Steinbeck’s Ghost (22 page)

The picture of the hanged man glowed on the wall.

The fire was dying out, and there was no more kindling. Tularecito had gone to the back of the cave and disappeared into what ever place he had come from. The cave seemed empty now, and cold.

“Why?” Hil said. “Why did they bring us up here?”

“I don’t quite know,” Oster said.

“The story,” Travis said. “It’s all about the story. I think Steinbeck had one more story to tell. At least the truer end of one story.”

Hil stirred the ashes of the fire with a twig.

“It was real, wasn’t it?” Hil said.

“We shared food with them,” Oster said. “We shared shelter with them. And the story, we shared their story. Is there anything more real than that?”

Hil and Travis shook their heads and stared into the fire. No, Travis thought, there was nothing more real than that.

“That story, the lynching,” Hil said. “Mr. Oster, could that be true, could it really have happened?”

“Ernest, please.”

“Ernest. Did things like that happen here?”

“I’m afraid so,” Oster said. “People can be very cruel. Almost anywhere on this planet, not just here. They
can
be. That’s why we have to tell such stories. To remember. To remind us that people
can
be cruel. But also that we don’t
have
to be.”

Travis looked at Hil. He wondered if it was any different for Hil to hear this story, because Hil’s family was Mexican. He wondered if he would have felt differently himself if his family had been Mexican. Yes, Travis was white and Hil was brown, but they were more the same than they were different. Did it make a difference why someone was killed so viciously? No, the color of someone’s skin, or the background of someone’s family, had nothing to do with it. It was a cruel and awful story: men killing other men for stupid reasons.

Johnny Bear snored, turned in his deep slumber.

“But what do we do with it?” Travis asked. “Now that we’ve got the story. It was over a hundred years ago. What are we supposed to do with it all? We have no proof. Oh, sure, these characters came out of some book and told us this horrible story. No one will believe us.”

Travis couldn’t help it, he was pounding the ground with his fist.

“We tell the story,” Oster said. “We write it down. We say, oh, this is just a story, and that way they’ll believe it. We remember for everyone else. It’s why we have stories.”

Johnny Bear shook and grunted and rolled over. He got to his hands and knees, then ponderously stood.

“Whiskey?” he said.

He went to the mouth of the cave and looked out, took the Old Tennis Shoes from his pocket and drained the bottle in one pull. Then he stepped out into the night. He swung the bottle out over the hillside, sailing it high and far, and after a long time, there was the sound of it breaking on rock. Then Johnny Bear raced down the scree.

When he got to the cave’s mouth, all Travis heard was Johnny Bear crashing through the undergrowth. He was gone.

It was night now, but still bright. The full moon had risen from behind the sandstone bluff .

The Watchers appeared on a faraway ridge; they turned from Travis and disappeared into the west. He wanted to call to Hil and Oster, to show them the Watchers, but it was too late. Without being able to give a reason for it, other than he felt it deeply in the air around him, Travis knew he would never see the Watchers again.

Hil and Oster came up behind Travis. He took a last glimpse inside the cave. The fire was out.

“Jeez, you guys,” Hil said. “We better book. My mom’s gonna kill me.”

Travis took out his cell phone and punched for his parents. They were glad to hear from him, and promised to call Hil’s folks. Travis loved standing out here in the full- moon night, and he also liked hearing his parents’ voices and knowing they were just on the other side of the mountain.

“A sugar moon,” Oster said, pointing up. “That’s what we used to call a moon like this.”

Because the sugar moon was so bright, they did not need their flashlights to guide them down the ravines to the valley floor.

During the drive back to Salinas, they talked and talked and talked. And, as people do at such times, they simply told the story of what had happened to them over and over again. To make sure they remembered it, to make sure it was real. It was real, they all agreed, everything they’d seen that day. They couldn’t figure out why it had happened, but they knew it had. And they all believed it had been about the story; they all believed that Steinbeck had one more story he needed to tell.

Instead of taking the freeway around Salinas, Oster kept on Highway 68 and went straight through town to the Steinbeck House. He parked in front, and they all got out. Travis prayed that Steinbeck’s ghost would be there; he wanted his friends to see it, wanted them to have that gift just once.

The attic bedroom windows were lighted yellow. Young Steinbeck sat at his desk, staring out the windows, a pen to his lips. He capped the pen and put it in his pocket, then closed the ledger he’d been writing in, stood up, and walked away from the desk. The yellow lights went out.

Every time he went to the library, for months after, Travis rode by the Steinbeck House. The windows were never lighted again.

T
HE WIND HAD DIED.
Outside Travis’s window, the world was still, and quiet ruled the house. The Santa Lucias were a dark blue gash against the golden, ocean- inspired sunset. It was cooler outside, too. Travis could feel the first bite of true autumn hovering at his window. He knew his astronomy; the world had turned, and the shadows stretched ahead, and the days would be shorter.

At dinner he could barely keep his eyes open, and there was a moment when he thought maybe the mashed potatoes would make a nice pillow. It was just him and his parents, but they’d been up at the Corral all day, with Hil and his parents, Oster and Miss Babb. They had explored and talked, all of them together, and then they talked some more. When he and his parents got home, they had a lovely dinner—his mom’s burgers were even better than Sheila’s—and things felt pretty good. But there’d been so many words that day, so many stories, and he needed the quiet. His parents, too, Travis could tell, thought the quiet was pretty nice.

He excused himself and went to his room and sat at his desk in his window and enjoyed the silence for an hour. He looked out the window and stared at the Santa Lucias.

After some time his thinking slowed down enough that he could make out individual words and sentences, his brain no longer a whirl of voices.

He pulled open the top desk drawer, where he’d stashed the ghostwriter’s composition book, and opened it to the first page. He read the words he’d scribbled on Halloween with Hil, the night of the floating lanterns.
The night so bright, even Bella Linda Terrace is beautiful. Halfway to home with a good friend.
He turned to the second page, where nothing was yet written.

He pulled out a black Pi lot Rolling Ball, slid the drawer shut, then turned on the desk lamp, scooted in his chair, and began to write.

For no good reason at all, he began at the end. It seemed the best place.

“We all went to the Corral the next day,” he wrote. “We had to. The minute I woke up, I told my parents we had to go back to the Corral. The night before, I told them everything that had happened with Johnny Bear and Tularecito, and the story of the Mexican farmer’s lynching, and we stayed up for a long time talking about it. My parents didn’t understand much more than I did about the story. So in the morning when I told them I wanted to go back to the Corral, they said yes, we had to, and just then Hil called and asked me if I wanted to go back, it was killing him, he was going to go with his parents no matter what I said. Then I called Oster and he practically shouted yes, and he said he’d call Miss Babb because she should come, too, and that was the best idea of a morning full of good ideas. Everyone needed to go there.”

He wrote quickly, the ink flowing across the page, smearing, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to read it all, but it was important to get it down. He needed to write it down; he’d promised Oster he would.

“So we packed lunches and headed out to the Corral, to the same place Oster and Hil and I had stopped before, where we always stopped, the dead end. We drove in different cars but got there around the same time. We stood around the cars talking, and now that there were more of us, the talking couldn’t be stopped. What happened in the cave, what did it mean, was it real? Everyone had to know. Then we hiked up to the cave, practically running up the ravines. We sort of looked for the plateau where we’d found, or thought we’d found, Steinbeck’s initials carved in that one tree, but there wasn’t anything like it, and we didn’t have time to look harder. We knew that the answers—if there were going to be any answers—were hidden in the cave.”

Travis looked at the white paper, its faint blue lines, watched the black ink unfurl from the pen like smoke from a chimney in a high wind. But that’s not what he saw when he wrote. As he wrote the words, he saw what they’d seen that day, what they’d all said, the hillsides rushing beneath their feet.

When they got to the cave, it was empty. The fire pit was there, obviously fresh. But there were no other signs of what had happened. The walls of the cave, even under the gaze of several flashlight beams, looked like the walls of a cave , no sign of Tularecito’s drawings . There were smudges, a few, but it was hard to tell if they were the ash smudges of Tularecito’s drawings, or some other kind of smudge— cave smudge?

At first, Miss Babb, Hil’s parents, and Travis’s parents stayed near the entrance of the cave. Travis could tell they wanted him and Hil and Oster to have the first look. Then Hil saw the circle and pointed to it.

“But the only thing there, the only real evidence, was this sort of lack of evidence, a big circle of swept dirt. Right where the statue of Johnny Bear had been—and where there was no statue, no leftover rocks at all—was a perfect circle swept into the floor of the cave, just the right size for the statue. It was too perfect a circle, you could just see that. Someone had left this circle for us. It was too perfect. We weren’t disappointed at all.”

When Travis saw the circle, he looked up at Oster, and then at Hil, and they were all looking at one another, and they were all smiling. In this perfect circle of nothing, they found all the evidence they needed.

As he wrote, his head was filled with a million other things he wanted to write about the circle, but he was writing too fast, didn’t have time for it all. These words would be a good bookmark; he could come back to them later, he knew, and know his millions of thoughts would return.

He was writing so fast he felt like he wasn’t moving the pen; the pen moved itself. The pages filled up.

They showed everyone else the circle, and they all agreed that it was a sign of some kind. Miss Babb looked positively giddy; Travis’s mom looked a little freaked out.

All of them scoured the cave for more evidence, but there was nothing. Not a single footprint. And the back of the cave, where Tularecito had come from, well, that narrowed down to a crack about six inches wide. When Travis put his ear to the crack, he heard nothing but the whoosh of deep and dark spaces.

They left the cave and climbed to the top of the sandstone bluff , where the day was perfect and cool, and there were some nice big stones for sitting on, and they broke out their picnic. They ate and thought, and stared out into the Corral, and back toward Salinas. They could see everything from up here, the whole world. Then they talked.

Travis stopped writing for a minute. He smoothed down the page he’d been writing across with the palm of his hand, heard the crunch and swish of the half- blank paper. He wanted to remember as precisely as he could, what each of them had said. The pen moved again under his hand.

First, Miss Babb made them go over the whole story, from the very first visit with Oster and Travis, to the second visit when they took Hil along. So Oster and Travis, and then Hil, told that story. But then Hil made them all back up, and they had to talk about Gitano and the Watchers and, of course, Steinbeck’s ghost. Hil’s and Travis’s parents and Miss Babb all had that look on their faces that you see when people are listening to … well, ghost stories. But this story, ghost or not, Travis knew, they believed.

“Then Hil’s dad started to talk,” Travis wrote, “and he told us stories his grandfather told him, about how badly the white farmers had treated the Mexicans when he was a kid, and even later. Then Oster spoke up, and he told us about his research into the Corral, and how he’d read newspaper stories of lynchings in and around Salinas. Some of the lynchings, he said, hadn’t happened that long ago, just before World War Two. Then we all talked about the horrible things that people did to each other. Hil and I listened a lot during this part, all the grownups talking. And somehow the whole afternoon filled up with all this talking.”

Travis looked down at his composition book. Then at his clock. Two hours had passed, and he’d already filled twenty- one pages.

He started to write again.

“Miss Babb finally asked the question everyone wanted to ask. We all believed this had happened, I could just tell, but she wanted to know—we all wanted to know—what did it mean? So Oster and Hil and me, we told them what we’d been saying all last night and all today. That Steinbeck had one more story to tell. We just couldn’t figure out why us, what it had to do with the library, why now? And none of us had any good answers. We finally agreed that we might never know. But we agreed it had happened. Then Miss Babb said the thing everyone was thinking. ‘Well, you guys,’ she said, and she pointed to me and Oster and Hil, ‘you have to write it all down. We don’t want to disappoint Mr. Steinbeck.’ ”

The sun had gone down, night was on, but Travis could still make out the rough silhouette of the Santa Lucias. He was suddenly tired, but he had to keep writing.

“So we went back to the cave, for just one more look, but just me and Hil and Oster, and we stood around the circle and made a promise that each of us would write down everything that had happened. We promised not to forget. Then we came home.”

Travis didn’t think he could write anymore. He knew it was late, he knew he had to get to sleep, had school tomorrow. He knew that this was just the beginning, too. It would take him a long time to write it all down, every single thing that had happened in the last few weeks, every detail. But he would. And not just because of the promise. Travis had made another promise in the cave, to himself. He would write everything down so that Oster could use it. He was going to make sure Oster would write his second book, make sure he’d use the story of Steinbeck’s ghost, make sure it was never forgotten.

He started to close the cover of the composition book, but a word popped into his head, the word he’d been looking for when Miss Babb asked what it all meant.

“Silence,” he wrote in clear, slow letters, and he hunched over the blank pages. “It’s about silence. Steinbeck was silent about the real story he knew, and it haunted him. And there was this silence in Bella Linda Terrace that almost killed me, until I remembered the word
Camazotz
. And Oster, Oster let himself be quiet because someone else told him to be. And Hil and I were almost not- friends because I couldn’t talk to him. My parents, too, they let the silence of their jobs shut up their real selves. And if the library closes, then all those books and all those words, they’ll be silent forever. You can’t let that kind of silence into the world. Make a noise.”

He closed the book, but didn’t put it in the desk drawer. He pushed it to one corner of the desk, where he knew it would be ready for him. tomorrow.

Travis never expected the benefit reading to be the monumental success it turned out. The Maya Cinema donated one of its theaters for the evening, and all 250 tickets sold out the day they went on sale. People came from all over Salinas, and from as far away as San Francisco and Los Angeles. At a hundred dollars a ticket, and thanks to the sales of books after the program, the Save Our Library committee was able to donate $29,730 to Rally Salinas.

On the night of the reading, everyone had dinner together at Sheila’s—Travis and his parents, Hil and his, Miss Babb and her husband and children, and Oster. “The whole gang,” Travis wrote the next day in his composition book. Sheila picked up their tab. There was noise and chatter and laughing all during dinner.

Afterward, they walked down Main Street to the theater, where the marquee read, in huge letters:
SAVE OUR LIBRARY.
Four floodlights scraped across the sky. It was a gala, Miss Babb said, a regular extravaganza. She was glad so much attention was focused on the library, but she still thought it was a little too much fumadiddle for a library. She looked forward to the day, she said, when going to work wasn’t about saving the world, but just another day at the library.

There were three special guests that night, authors of beloved books for younger readers—E. L. Konigsburg, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Laurence Yep, who, being from nearby Pacific Grove, was the headliner. Each of the writers had paid their own way to be part of the benefit.

But before the three main readers, there were two others, Hil and Travis. Miss Babb had asked them both if they’d choose a section from one of their favorite books to share with the audience. Travis and Hil pretended to be shy for about seven seconds each before they agreed to participate. Miss Babb wanted to thank them for all their work on the committee, and to remind everyone in attendance that the library was about readers.

Hil read the Camazotz section from
A Wrinkle in Time
, and even though it’s not a particularly funny section, he had everyone in stitches. He had a magic voice like that. He made everyone in the audience see the absurdity of a world where everything was exactly the same.

Travis, of course, read from
Corral de Tierra
. He had tried and tried to get Oster to read, but there was no budging him. Oster told Travis he felt as if the book belonged more to Travis than to him anymore. He hadn’t told Oster he was going read from
Corral de Tierra
until dinner the night of the reading, by which time, he knew, it would be too late for Oster to complain. Much to his surprise, though, Oster didn’t object; in fact, he seemed delighted. Travis could swear that Oster was blushing.