Steinbeck’s Ghost (7 page)

A minute later the first car pulled in. When the first committee members arrived—Jack Ray and Theodore, both in shorts and Tshirts—seven cars were waiting in line.

The line never ended. All day long the cars kept coming, and so did the volunteers. A circus, Travis thought, a real riot. The cars got washed and dried—vacuumed for two bucks extra—but not without a lot of fun.

It was Miss Babb who started the water fights. Late in the afternoon, she came up to Travis, who was taking a break, and asked him if he was hot and tired and needed some refreshment. When he said, “Oh yeah,” she lifted one of the hoses and let him have it full blast, right in the chest. Travis shook his hands and looked down at his shirt. Then slowly, very slowly, he leaned over, picked a soapy rag out of a bucket and threw it right at her, bull’seye. At that moment, Travis felt water stinging him from behind. It was his dad brandishing one of the other hoses, and Travis ran after him with fistfuls of soapy rags. Within minutes, every volunteer, and several customers, were drenched and bubbly.

All day long there was music and food and talk talk talk. And laughter. They took turns passing out flyers in front of the Safeway and the Colonel Foxworthy’s Coffee Emporium and the Mango Tango juice bar. Everyone they talked to seemed concerned about the library, almost angry. More than five hundred flyers were passed out.

Near the end of the day, Travis was sitting alone under the banner, tired and wet, when he realized that it was still noisy at the car wash. The talking wouldn’t stop. Hil’s dad and Travis’s mom stood talking with Miss Babb, and everyone’s hands were flying everywhere, and Travis knew they were talking about the library. Hil and Jack Ray were looking at one of the flyers and pointing to it, obviously coming up with better information and designs for the next one.

When he’d first heard about the library closing, Travis had felt completely alone. Now, he knew, he was part of something huge, and he figured that, with everyone working together, the library might stand a chance of winning. He’d played soccer when he was in third and fourth grade, and the coaches were always talking about teamwork. For the first time he felt like he knew what a team really was: each person working toward the same goal.

The last car was dried and buffed a little after six. An enormous moon, bursting orange, rose from behind the lime quarry against the mountains. When they counted the money in the cigar box, and added the money from the tip jar—Travis’s idea—it came to $578.44. That was a long way from eight million dollars, but it hardly seemedto matter.

After the car wash, Travis and his parents went to Hil’s house for pizza with his family. It was the first time the two families had gotten together, and the talking just continued, about everything under the sun. It almost felt, Travis thought, like the old days. And on Sunday, both families hung out at the pool—wet again—a great day made a little bigger by the glow of the car wash’s success.

But when dinner was over on Sunday and Travis went up to his room to catch up on homework—he was really behind—suddenly all the excitement was gone. His room was just his room, nothing more. He walked around it and looked at all his stuff , as if he were seeing it for the first time. His room and his life looked absolutely normal to him, and that’s what was weird about it.

He had continued to live his normal life—going to school, watching TV, listening to music—but he had this other life now, and it felt more important than his normal life. It—Camazotz, the library, the books, Gitano, Steinbeck’s ghost—felt like his real life now. Hil was somewhere in the middle, sometimes a part of his normal life and sometimes a part of his real life. Travis didn’t know yet where Hil would end up.

Yes, those were the right words,
normal
and
real
. They could have meant the same thing, those words, but there was a big difference, Travis felt. Normal was the everyday life, the dum-dee-dum-dum kind of life, the walking down the street but not paying too much attention life, the life the whole world lived. The real life was the wideawake, eyes-open, noticing-every-rock-and-every-shift-of-wind life, the life each person lived when they were most alive.

In his Sunday-quiet bedroom, Travis stood suspended for a moment between his normal life and his real one. Which one should he follow? He didn’t have a choice, really. He’d have to follow both lives, live in both worlds.

He looked around his room. Yes, his normal life was still there—there was his computer, there was his CD player, his basketball. He would wake up in the morning, and his normal life would continue.

He looked at the stacks of books on his desk. These were his new life, his real life.
A Wrinkle in Time
led him to the library. Which led him to
Corral de Tierra
, which led him to
The Pastures of Heaven
, which led him to
The Long Valley
. And these books had led him to the other mysteries that surrounded him—Gitano and the Watchers and Steinbeck’s ghost—led him deeper into a world he’d never suspected.

Books could do that to you. When you read, the world really did change. He understood this now. You saw parts of the world you never knew existed. Books were in the world; the world was in books.

He sat at his desk and stared out at the Santa Lucias in the west. Tomorrow he would resume his normal life. To night he would read.

He flipped through his library copy of
The Pastures of Heaven
, reading the first paragraph of each story, to remind him of what happened in it.

Travis didn’t understand everything that happened in
The Pastures of Heaven
, but he knew enough. There was something dark in the stories, some kind of curse. Every family that moved into the Corral expected to find paradise. But they never found it, and often their lives were ruined—they lost their money and their farms, their honor, sometimes their lives. They had all wished too hard for a perfect world. He couldn’t help but think of Bella Linda Terrace, and he wondered if his parents had made the same mistake.

When he looked out the window at the Santa Lucias, he didn’t only see the silhouette of the mountains. He saw into the past, saw all the people who had ever lived in the Corral, and all the stories about them. He also saw more deeply into his own world, his own life.

After a while he got into bed and opened
The Long Valley
. He’d read “Flight” a few days before, and there he found the Watchers he’d seen on the ridge behind his house. To night he started
The Red Pony
, the novella in the back of
The Long Valley
. It was all he could do to keep from crying when Jody’s foal Gabilan died, even though he knew that part was coming.

He continued to the second section of
The Red Pony
, “The Great Mountains,” and found it was all new to him. He’d forgotten this part, about Jody and the mountains that obsessed him, which Travis now knew were the Santa Lucias. Jody was always looking off toward these mountains, the same view Travis had from his bedroom window.

Then the book almost leaped out of Travis’s hands when an old stranger arrived on Jody’s father’s ranch. The stranger was an old “paisano,” half Mexican and half Indian, and he claimed that he had once worked on the ranch. The first thing the old paisano said in the story was, “I am Gitano, and I have come back.”

Travis dug himself deeper under the covers and kept reading.

In
The Red Pony
Gitano spent much of his time looking at the Great Mountains, the Santa Lucias. When Jody asked him if he’d ever been there, Gitano told him that, yes, he had been there, once. But it was a long time ago, when he was a child. Had he ever been back? Jody wanted to know. No. What had he seen there, in the Great Mountains? Gitano refused to talk about what he’d seen.

A noise broke Travis’s reading. But from where?

Travis sat up, looked around his room. The noise— whatever it was, a snapping twig, a door clicking shut— could have come from anywhere. In the fresh silence, Travis heard the echo of the noise. It might’ve come from the front yard or from inside the house. It might have come out of the book.

He floated through the house. Not a whit of noise, not even his father’s incredibly loud snoring.

The memory of the noise, the echo of it, called him outside.

He put on shorts and sandals, went down to the garage, and slipped out the side gate on his bike. Like most kids, Travis knew how to sneak around at night undetected.

The houses of Bella Linda Terrace were bonewhite in the harsh glow of the orange streetlights and the white cloud of almost- full moonlight. To night every house seemed even more like its neighbor than before.

He shot through the front gate of Bella Linda Terrace and crossed Boronda Road. He pulled up in front of the barbed wire fence that bordered the neighboring foothills. He stared into the world in the night. He wanted to move past the fence, but couldn’t.

Were the Watchers at the top of the ridge again? He couldn’t tell. Something was up there, shapes moving across the blue- green hills.

He turned to go home. There was Bella Linda Terrace, Camazotz, waiting for him. He had a sudden thought. Did the high stone wall around Bella Linda Terrace keep people out, or keep people in? It was hard to know. Everything looked different under the sodium lights.

T
RAVIS COULDN’T WAIT TO GET TO THE LIBRARY AND SEE MISS BABB.
At school that day, he’d come up with a great idea for the committee to consider.

He was staring at a poster of famous writers behind Miss Galbraith’s desk in third- period En glish, when it struck him. He didn’t know who all these writers were, but it was the photos of the writers that inspired his truly simple thought: Writers were real people. At least before they were dead. He knew this thought was connected to Steinbeck’s ghost. Seeing Steinbeck’s ghost in the attic window had made him realize that writers had been kids once, had grown up somewhere, and were only writers when they sat down to write. They didn’t just live in photos on the backs of books.

And if writers didn’t care about libraries, then who would? Travis thought the committee should invite famous writers to put on a benefit reading for the library. There had to be famous writers living around here. The committee could sell tickets and raise money, and the more famous the writers, the more publicity for the library.

At lunch he went to the computer lab and surfed the Net, where he found several writers he recognized who lived nearby. Laurence Yep, who wrote
Dragonwings
, lived in Pacific Grove, and Beverly Cleary, who wrote all the Henry Huggins and Ramona and Beezus books, she lived in Carmel. Travis loved both these writers. The one writer he couldn’t find was Ernest Oster. It was weird; there wasn’t a single mention of Oster or
Corral de Tierra
anywhere on the Internet. He assumed Oster lived near Salinas somewhere, if he was still alive.

Travis wanted to fly into the library and heroically slap the list of writers in front of Miss Babb—he’d imagined this all day—but when he saw her, he knew the time wasn’t right. She looked like she’d been punched in the stomach.

The mailing committee was scheduled to work in the library’s A/V room, a small office off the back corner of the main collection. One side of the room was stuffed with DVD players, CD players, reel- to- reel tape decks, and a bulky, old- fashioned 16mm film projector. The walls were crowded with shelves of DVDs, CDs, even record albums, the big black vinyl discs his parents used to listen to.

Miss Babb was sitting at a small table, surrounded by boxes of envelopes, stacks of bright green flyers, pages of mailing labels. The other chairs were empty.

“Oh, Travis,” Miss Babb said, looking up and forcing a smile. “Bad news. We’ve canceled the meeting. I tried calling, but you’d left already. I’m sorry.”

The other four members of the mailing committee had called earlier that day. Everyone had a good “excuse.” Miss Babb said the word
excuse
as if it tasted sour.

“You might as well get on home,” she told him. “We’ll reschedule, work up some new flyers.”

“But I’m here. Can’t we just do it anyway? I mean, we have to, the big council meeting is right around the corner.”

“That’s sweet, Travis. But we’ll never get through all these on our own. I think we’ll be okay without these fly-ers. Maybe I’m just too worked up about it all.”

“No,” he said. “We have to do it. I know we can. Every little bit, right? It might take all night, but we can do it.” There was a huge difference between Travis’s normal life—school and home and all that—and his new, improved, and much weirder life—the library and everything around it. In this new, improved, and much weirder life, he had endless energy to work on anything. At home, his mom had to beg to get him to load the dishwasher or take out the trash. But at the library, he couldn’t wait to get started.

“I can’t ask you to stay that late.”

“You can ask my parents.”

Travis called his mom at work. He always started with his mom. She was the stricter of his parents, and it sometimes seemed easiest going straight to the heart of it. He hated getting permission for something from his father, only to have his mom take it back.

Miss Babb explained everything, promised to give Travis a ride home, ten o’clock at the very latest. Travis swore he’d done his homework already. And this was true, he’d done it at lunch, but he would have lied if he hadn’t. The library could not wait. Homework was important, sure. But the library, that needed to be taken care of now.

“Okay, then,” Miss Babb said. “Dig in.”

She thumbed one flyer from the stack, folded it into three parts, slid it into an envelope, licked the flap and sealed it, then peeled off a mailing label and attached it.

Travis stood over her.

“I bet we can do them all, every single one,” he said. “I’ve got a system.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “What do you bet?”

“Take- out sushi for dinner. You pay.”

“Sushi?” she said, her head cocked to one side.

“Heck, yes. I’ve been eating sushi since I was born. I mean, we’re only a few miles from the ocean. Please tell me you like sushi.”

Miss Babb looked from the stacks of envelopes and flyers to Travis, back again.

“You’re on,” she said.

Travis showed her what to do. One of them would take the envelopes out of the boxes, and stack them so that the flaps were open and tiered like escalator steps. The other would take small stacks of flyers, five or ten, and fold them into threes, but not too creased. The top flyer would slip off easily enough, then it could be zipped into the top envelope. Wet paper towels from the rest room were faster for sealing the envelopes, and no one ended up with the dreaded “mint- glue mouth.” When a stack of envelopes was done, Travis would flat-ten it, putting in the final creases, and when all of the envelopes were done, they would add the mailing labels.

Travis set up two stations to run his system.

“Piece of cake,” Miss Babb said. She was obviously delighted, relieved.

“Piece of sushi, you mean.”

“I give. You win. Sushi it is.”

The flyers flew and the envelopes enveloped, and Travis and Miss Babb talked about, well, about everything—the library and the weather and new movies and old movies. Pretty soon they were deep into the mailing.

While they ate—California rolls with crab and avocado, and unagi nigiri, Travis’s favorite, broiled eel on a piece of sticky rice and wrapped with a seaweed belt—Travis spelled out his idea for the benefit reading.

“Funny you should mention it,” Miss Babb said. “I was just thinking the same thing today. Now I know it’s a good idea. If you had it, too, it’s gotta be good.”

He showed her the list of writers he’d drawn up. There were twenty- three so far, all of whom lived between Salinas and San Francisco. He figured at least four or five of them would come to their aid.

“We may think alike,” she said. “But you actually do the work. This is great, Travis.”

“The only one I couldn’t find,” he said, munching his last piece of unagi, “is Ernest Oster. I’d love to invite him, he’d be perfect. I mean his book is all about Steinbeck and everything, and he’d be great, I just know it. But I can’t find anything.”

“Yes, that is a shame.”

The library closed at eight on Tuesdays, and to night was emptied and locked up by 8:05. Only Travis and Miss Babb remained. It was cool being in the library alone in the dark. Creepy, but cool.

In the fourth grade Travis’s favorite book was
From the Mixed- up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
by E. L. Konigsburg. He read it at least five times and did a huge book report on it, including a diorama that showed James and Claudia sleeping in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. James and Claudia had sneaked into the museum, having run away from their home in Connecticut in search of adventure—Claudia’s idea— and hid out in the museum for an entire week, sleeping in a four- hundred- year- old bed that probably belonged to a king. For baths, they splashed around in a big fountain, then scooped up all the coins museum- goers had thrown into it for luck.

Even though nothing too exciting happened in the book—the paintings did not come to life, there were no ghosts or zombies—Travis loved it. He used to dream about being alone in a big museum at night. Being here in the library now was pretty close; he felt sneaky, adventurous.

“Okay,” Miss Babb said. “It’s time to have some fun.”

She hauled out a beige, cloth- covered suitcase and opened it. Inside was a turntable; Travis recognized it from his father’s old record albums. Miss Babb was always busy, always doing something, but now that the library had closed and they were alone, she seemed both more relaxed and more full of energy somehow. She was practically dancing as she set everything up.

“This is a record player,” she said. “A little bit of the old magic. And this,” she said, slipping a big black plate from a cardboard sleeve, “is a record album, thirty- three and a third r.p.m. It’s from a time before”—she paused for dramatic effect—“computers ruled the world.”

At first they listened to recordings of old radio shows, from way before television—
Fibber McGee & Molly
,
The Lone Ranger
, Charlie McCarthy, W. C. Fields. Travis was amazed at the vivid pictures that sprang up in his head when he listened to these old shows. He was stuffing and sealing envelopes, but he saw everything those characters did.

Then Miss Babb put on a record of poets reading their own poems, really old recordings, with scratches and pops and hisses. Travis didn’t “get” the poems, but it wasn’t about “getting” them, Miss Babb said, it was about the words the poets used, about those words sinking into your body. It was about the plea sure of that.

But the best was last.

“Now, Travis,” Miss Babb said. “You have to understand that what I’m about to play is a bit risqué. That is, it’s totally inappropriate. For anyone. And that’s why it’s so funny. I give you
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
.”

Travis had watched Monty Python reruns on TV with his dad. Monty Python was a group of comedians from En gland, perhaps the silliest people who had ever lived. Listening to them in the bright room in the dark library, they were even funnier.

Miss Babb actually fell out of her chair once, she was laughing so hard, and at one point Travis thought he might never breathe again. All Miss Babb had to say was, “She turned me into a newt,” and Travis would start laughing all over again.

They finished the very last envelope at ten minutes to ten. Travis called his mom and told her he was on his way home, and he and Miss Babb scrunched his bike into the back of her Volvo. Travis didn’t ask her to drive by the Steinbeck House. He knew the window would be lit, the writer at his desk.

All the way home, he and Miss Babb sang Python’s “Finland, Finland, Finland, country that I love,” and repeated, word for word, the “How Do You Know She Is a Witch?” sketch. He could not get enough of “She turned me into a newt.”

Miss Babb parked in front of Travis’s house, but before he could get out, she put her hand on his wrist. She’d turned serious on a dime.

“Travis, I have to tell you something. I actually know Ernest Oster. He’s a very nice man. But I can’t tell you where to find him. I made him a promise years ago. I promised not to tell anyone where he is. He’s a very private person, and I can’t break that promise.”

Miss Babb looked at Travis, right at him, as if she were testing him. It made him a little uncomfortable, but he knew this was a big moment, so he kept his eyes steady, did not look down or away.

“But,” she said, “you have a great idea. And the time might be right for Ernest to come out of hiding. Don’t ask me any more questions about him, okay? I already feel like I’m cheating. Just listen. You can find him. And it’s easy. Everything you need to know is in the library. And that’s all I can say. Deal?”

They shook on it.

Travis and his parents had to park blocks away from City Hall. Normally Oldtown Salinas was deserted at night, the streets and sidewalks empty, most of the businesses closed. To night, though, the place was jumping, streams of people headed in the same direction. The city council’s only agenda item to night was the library, and Travis couldn’t believe all these people were here to save it. Just awesome, he thought.

The city council’s chamber was a squat, glass- walled building—Travis thought it looked like a bottle cap— right next to the sidewalk on Lincoln Street, but tonight it was impossible to see. News vans, their white antennae aimed at the sky, blocked the view. There were news crews from all over: local stations, San Francisco stations, national stations, even one painted with what looked like Swedish words.