Steinbeck’s Ghost (11 page)

Was that the signal Travis was looking for?

A
LL THAT WEEK TRAVIS BURIED HIMSELF IN HIS ROOM.
In his real life, that is, or what he thought of as his real life now. He read parts of Steinbeck over and over. He concentrated on
The Pastures of Heaven,
finished it a second time, and read the beginning again and again. What had Steinbeck written to Oster, something about not telling anyone what had
really
happened there, that it was good the town was now lost? And Oster. Why had Oster decided not to go back to the Corral? He had moved, he told Travis, to California in part because of the letter and that mystery, and then he’d written an entire book about the Corral, but then let some riled- up rancher scare him off with a couple of what he called “potshots.” That didn’t add up, not at all. Maybe there were clues in the book.

As much as he read, though, as much as he came to understand from the book that there was something not quite right about the Corral, there were no “aha” clues that jumped out at him. What ever the mystery was, it was, well, pretty mysterious.

And he reread “Flight” to see what else he could pick up about the Watchers, and he reread the Gitano portion of
The Red Pony
. But there were no obvious clues there either. The more he read, the more he found himself entrenched in the stories and the more certain he was that everything in his “real life” was truly connected. He just couldn’t find the map that would lead him to the simple solution he craved, the how and why of these sudden connections.

In his other life, his non- real life, as he was coming to think of it, everything went on pretty much as normal, school and homework, and going back and forth from one to the other.

Hil was still around, but he had just started soccer practice—he was a terrifi c player—and he really threw himself into it.

Travis’s parents, he had to admit, were being great; they weren’t working quite as much, and took him to Sheila’s again and the pool, and that was the realest part of his non- real life.

But still, he waited for any chance to slip out of the non- real life, and get back to the real life. And finally, the next Tuesday came, and it was time for the committee meeting.

There were only three members present: Miss Babb, Travis, and Ernest Oster. Everyone else, according to Miss Babb, sent along their regrets.

“That’s one more thing about saving the world,” she said. “It can get kind of lonely.”

But hearing her say this made Travis feel less lonely. At least they were in it together. And besides, he’d have a better chance to talk to Oster.

Miss Babb had decided that information was the library’s best defense. And offense, too.

“We are, after all,” she said to the two of them as if speaking to a crowded room, “a library. Duh! Information is all we have.”

The first order of business that day was a vote on “appropriations.” Should the committee set aside some of its money for mailing costs—paper, printing, postage?

They agreed to one thousand dollars for these costs; the remaining nine thousand dollars was to be sent to Rally Salinas. That money would be used to keep the library open as long as possible.

When Travis showed up in the A/V room that day, Miss Babb and Oster were already there, chatting close to each other, smiling and laughing. If he hadn’t known it already, Travis would have guessed that these were two long- lost friends re united. They were flat-out happy.

Miss Babb had composed a new flyer to be sent out to the mailing list. The flyer was an update on the city council meeting, but it stressed the point that the fight was far from over: They still needed money and volunteers. There was a quote from Travis at the bottom of the flyer: “Libraries connect us to other human beings—Travis Williams, age 13.” Travis thought it was really cool, although he tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed.

There was a second flyer as well, a press release to be sent to newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, and other libraries around the world. During recess and lunch at school Travis had spent hours on the Internet gathering addresses for Miss Babb. It was important, she said, that the world know that Steinbeck’s library was closing.

Miss Babb went off to her office to add new entries to the mailing lists, and left Travis and Oster to fold and stuff .

They stuffed and folded and talked about Miss Babb, what a great person she was. And then there was silence. A really uncomfortable silence.

The one notion that had been dogging Travis since he’d met Oster was hanging around and just wouldn’t go away, like a pesky little dog. Why, Travis was dying to know, had Oster stopped writing, why had he never written another book?

Given that his head was filled with a million other questions, and that Oster was sitting right across from him, and they were alone, Travis tucked his politeness away and broke the really uncomfortable silence. How much more uncomfortable could it get?

“I want to ask you a question,” Travis said.

“Okay,” Oster said. He set aside the stack of flyers he was folding. He seemed to know this would be a big question. “Shoot.”

Go ahead, Big T, Travis could almost hear Hil egging him on.

“Why did you stop writing?” he asked, looking away, suddenly very interested in the engineering of letter- sized envelopes. “Why didn’t you write another book?”

Phew. He said it.

Oster pushed back in his chair and sighed. He swiveled his head on his neck, as if sore. He sighed again.

“I’m sorry,” Travis said. “It’s just—”

Oster put up his hand.

“No, Travis. It’s a good question. Do me a favor. Let me answer it for you. You’d be doing me a favor, honestly.”

Oster picked up the short stack of flyers and began to fold them again.

“I didn’t quit,” Oster said. “Not at first. Only later. Travis, I’m going to tell you something I’ve only told one other person outside my family—and that person was Charlene. It’s not a huge secret, gosh, no. No one cares about the writing career of Ernest Oster, so, no, it’s not a secret. It’s just embarrassing, is all.”

Oster stopped folding. He was looking through the wall across from him.

“I
did
write a second book. Wrote it after I finished
Corral
, but before that was published. It was called
Steinbeck’s Ghost
.”

Travis was unaccountably giddy at these words. Maybe Oster had a copy, maybe he’d loan it to him. A new Ernest Oster book, how cool was that?

“But where is it? How come I’ve never seen it? It’s not on the Internet.”

“Very few people have. It was never published.”

Oster paused, looked straight at Travis.

“This is the diffi cult part. For me. My publisher, the same one who published
Corral
, he rejected the second book. Sent me a one- sentence letter. I can still remember it exactly. Sorry, it said, but this is just a typical ghost story. And that was that.
Corral
didn’t sell much at all, and I knew when I got that letter that I was a one- book writer. Some writers only have one real book in them. So I put the second one away. I won’t lie to you; that was a very hard thing for me to accept.”

A cloud of questions flew from Travis: Why didn’t? Wasn’t there? How about?

“No, you’re right,” Oster said. “I could have kept going. Probably should have, now that I think about it. But I quit. Can you understand? I had two children by then, and I didn’t have a choice. I gave up writing and went to work for Spreckels. I did what I had to. I stuffed envelopes, in a manner of speaking. I pushed a load of paper at Spreckels. For my family.”

Spreckels. The high fences and bland concrete buildings rose up in Travis’s mind. Spreckels looked like a prison.

“I don’t care,” Travis said, “what anyone says.
Corral de Tierra
is a great book, and I really wish you’d written more. Your publisher was wrong.”

Travis wanted to look away, but he didn’t.

“Thank you, Travis. You have no idea how much that means to me.”

“Tell me more,” Travis said.

“More?”

“About you. I’ve never met a writer before.”

The afternoon flowed on. Travis listened. It wasn’t until he was back home that night that he was able to put the whole story together.

Ernest Oster was born in 1940 in Waukegan, Illinois. It was, all in all, a terrific place to grow up, a typically American small town. Long, slow summers playing outside till all hours, diving and swimming in creeks and ponds, brass bands in the town square. In the winter, snow and ice—skating and snow forts and neighborhood snowball battles. An old stone- built downtown, wideporched brick and wood Victorian homes. Waukegan was a picture postcard of an America that only existed in movies and books anymore.

Oster had lived a remarkably normal childhood there. His father was a loan officer at a bank, his mother a hardworking house keeper and wonderful cook. Oster had an older brother and a younger sister, each two years on either side of him, and they got on, and fought, too, as brothers and sisters will. Oster went to school, had best friends, rode a bike, joined the scouts. Nothing out of the ordinary, and maybe that was the most extraordinary thing of all.

If you wanted to know what it was like growing up in Waukegan, you had to read some of Ray Bradbury’s books, especially
Something Wicked This Way Comes
and
The Halloween Tree
. Take out the spooky bits, and that was Waukegan. Bradbury, Oster had said, was born in Waukegan and lived there until he was a teenager.

Travis had read both
Something Wicked This Way Comes
and
The Halloween Tree
. What he loved most about Bradbury was—and in this way he was a lot like Steinbeck—you really felt, when you were reading him, that you were there in those places. Travis could smell the burning leaves of a Bradbury autumn.

“Did you know Bradbury?” Travis asked. “Was he a friend of yours?”

“I did meet him,” Oster said. “But he’s twenty years older than me. I met him later, when I was a teenager. But I’ll get to that story.”

Suffice to say—Oster used this phrase several times—it was a happy childhood, everything a kid could ask for.

Suffice to say, Oster should have been happy to live in Waukegan his entire life, follow his father into banking, marry and have kids there, die a happy man. All in Waukegan.

Then something happened. When he was fourteen. A small thing, it might seem from the outside, but a powerful thing nonetheless. Oster wasn’t kidnapped by aliens or forced into servitude by an evil landlord. He didn’t discover that he was a wizard. Nothing that dramatic. But equally potent.

He checked out a book from the library.

Oster had always been a reader, though not particularly voracious. And most of his books came from the public library, the same library Bradbury had once frequented.

He read all the typical stuff a boy would read— adventure. The Western shoot- ’em- ups of Zane Grey, the bizarre science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels, stories of war and sports and mystery. He liked to read, but he liked to do other things, too. Reading was simply one part of his happy childhood.

Then, when he was fourteen, in 1954, he asked his favorite librarian, Mrs. French, for something new. He’d grown weary of adventure. He wanted, he told Mrs. French, a book about the real world.

“Well,” she said. “That’s easy.” She took two steps, slipped a book from its shelf, and put it in Oster’s hands before he could read the title or see the cover. “You look like you’re ready for this.”

“Kind of like Miss Babb has done for me,” Travis said. “She’s great at that.” Travis remembered, vividly, the first time Miss Babb gave him
The Red Pony
. He could still feel the threads in the cloth on the cover of the book.

“It’s what librarians do,” Oster said. “And it’s almost a kind of magic.”

Oster told Travis he would never forget that moment— what Mrs. French said, the grace with which she moved, the bright spring sunlight bouncing on the library’s stone floor.

That book was
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck. Oster’s first thought was, oh no, this book was much too long. But because he liked Mrs. French so much, no,
admired
her, he checked it out.

That night in his bedroom, in the attic of a perfectly ordinary home, Oster cracked open
The Grapes of Wrath
and read the first sentence: “ To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”

It’s hard to say how a quiet moment like that can have so much impact on one’s life, Oster said, the silent reading of a few bits of prose. But such moments—at least Oster liked to believe—can change your entire life. You just have to be ready.

After reading those words and the book that followed, Oster never saw the world in the same way again. He knew almost immediately that there was a big world outside of Waukegan, that it was real, that the people there were real people, and that he needed to know more about the world, needed, absolutely needed, to go out there.

And he never saw Waukegan in the same way after that either. His hometown was no longer a cozy background for his childhood games. It was a real city filled with real people, whose lives he had only begun to fathom.