Steinbeck’s Ghost (3 page)

“Miss Babb,” Travis said. “If you have a computer, why do you still use a date- stamper?”

“I only do this for special readers, Mr. Williams. Friends of the library. And I like the sound of it.”

She opened the back cover of
The Pastures of Heaven
Ker-chunk
.

The man who called himself Gitano was asleep under a bottlebrush tree. He was curled up against the mural of old Salinas, his back to Travis. In the lowering dusk he was hard to make out, nothing but a soft pile of blue- and-gray cloth. “I am Gitano and I have come back,” the man had yelled. A strange thing to say; what did it mean? It was a familiar sentence, something Travis had read in a book. As the last light of day faded, Gitano seemed to sink back into the mural.

Travis swung into his backpack, the books thumping against him, and wheeled away from the library down San Luis, headed to Riker Street. When he’d left Bella Linda Terrace this afternoon, he didn’t yet know he was going to visit his old house, it wasn’t even an idea then. But the library and his old house were so connected, it now seemed the obvious thing to do. He really should be getting home—he certainly didn’t want to get busted by his parents—but he’d hadn’t been to the old house since the move. He was willing to take that chance.

The streets of the neighborhood were quiet, but he could hear, over on Main, traffic honking and barking. The afternoon wind had died, and the air around him was fresh and clear, the heat fading quickly. He felt like he was breathing again for the first time in a long time.

He pulled up on the sidewalk in front of 137 Riker. At first, everything looked the same, all the lights were on, the shallow porch of the bungalow inviting. The bike lurched forward an inch or two, and Travis felt he could go right up the walk, into his old house and his old life.

The dining room curtains were open, the room bright and clean. A fancy table was set for dinner, two candles lit and flickering. The scene was perfect, and all quite wrong.

When Travis and his parents lived here, they ate at a small table in the kitchen. Back then, the dining room was his dad’s music room. Keyboards and guitars and speakers lined the walls. Cords snaked everywhere. It was never neat.

The lawn in front of 137 had been completely resodded, and strange flowers grew out of the beds along the bottom of the porch. On the porch, an old- fashioned swing- chair sat waiting. A square flag with a giant pumpkin and the word
AUTUMN
rustled in the dying breeze. Definitely not his house anymore.

Just then a woman came into the dining room. She wore a white apron and carried a dish she held with oven mitts. Behind her followed a man and a little girl, a first or second grader. The family sat at the table, the mom and dad at each end, the little girl in the middle facing the street.

The girl waved at Travis, and her parents turned to see who was outside.

He stood on the pedals of his bike and pushed off , away from his old house, quite uncertain how to feel about what he’d just seen.

Travis coasted through the neighborhood past the dusky blue houses. He zagged over to Central, headed home, to Bella Linda Terrace, knowing he was probably late and headed for some kind of trouble. But the Steinbeck House was on the way.

132 Central was where Steinbeck had been born and raised, and where he had written
The Red Pony
and
Tortilla Flat
when he returned home to take care of his dying mother. After Travis started reading Steinbeck, his parents took him to the house for lunch. Volunteers from the Valley Guild served lunches there to help pay for the upkeep of the house and to provide scholarships for local students. Travis loved being in the old Victorian, knowing that the famous writer had lived in its rooms, which were done up in the style of the times, but he was a little disappointed that he couldn’t go upstairs to Steinbeck’s boyhood bedroom. The manager told him that their insurance didn’t allow it; the stairs were too steep. He’d always wanted to go back to the house, as if he could breathe in more of Steinbeck’s world there, get closer to the books he loved.

To night, small spotlights showed the front of the house, but it was otherwise dark. Travis sat on his bike across the street. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be in the upstairs bedroom looking out, to be the writer creating his stories. He wondered if he’d ever sit in his own window and write his own stories.

A light came on in the two small attic windows above the front door. A shadow appeared, a person, who pulled aside the lace curtains and looked out one of the windows. A man. No, younger—a teenager. The boy sat down, his head still visible. He was looking at something that Travis couldn’t see.

Travis crossed the street to get a better look, but as he approached the house, the line of sight grew too steep, and he couldn’t see anything of the window. He crossed back to the other side.

The boy was still there, a silhouette against the warm yellow room. He stood up and walked out of sight, then crossed the back of the room, then out of sight again, then appeared before the window, staring down. The boy, Travis saw, wore a white shirt with dark suspenders. He sat down again, quite still, his left hand holding his tilted head.

It didn’t seem quite right. Not normal, for sure. Why would a teenage boy be in the house at night? But he wasn’t doing anything. This was no burglar.

Travis stared at the figure in the window. The boy was concentrating. Reading, maybe, or writing. The rest of the house was completely dark inside. It didn’t make any sense that someone would still be there at night.

The long, low whistle of a freight train broke the evening stillness. Travis looked east, past Oldtown. He could almost feel the train’s rumble.

When he turned back to the Steinbeck House, the window was dark and the boy was gone.

Sweating bullets and pumping at full speed, Travis blew through the stone- walled entrance to Bella Linda Terrace—beautiful, beautiful place, ha!—and tore down the streets. His head was filled with sentences he kept trying out—where he had been, why he hadn’t left a note, the seven different excuses why he was late, even the truth of it. The excuses and the truth all seemed lame to him. He wasn’t sure he’d believe any of them himself.

No two doubts about it. He was in trouble.

But from the far end of Harbor Mist Way, Travis could see that his house was dark. His parents weren’t even home yet.

When his parents finally did get home, a little before ten, he was already in bed and reading the first pages of
The Pastures of Heaven
. Maybe this book held some clue to what he’d seen in the window of the Steinbeck House.

A
LL DAY FRIDAY AT SCHOOL TRAVIS STARED OUT THE WINDOW, BUT NO ONE SEEMED TO NOTICE.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the library, how good it was to be back there, and he was amazed at how those books seemed to fall into his lap. It was weird to realize, too, that the library seemed more of a home to him than his old house—there was a new family in that house, it wasn’t his anymore. But the library still was.

In Mrs. Lamy’s Spanish class, last period, Travis kept going back to the boy in the window at the Steinbeck House, for some reason the spookiest piece of yesterday’s puzzle. Whenever the image of the boy came to him—a teenager in suspenders in front of the window—Travis got the strange sensation that the answer was too easy to miss. But it was just some teenager in a window, and it wasn’t even that late at night—what was so weird about that?

At one point he thought, Oh, I know, I’m in some scary book now, and that’s Steinbeck’s ghost calling to me. Out loud—he actually did this out loud, he couldn’t believe it—he made the spooky- movie ghost noise while everyone else was quietly studying irregular verbs, “Ooo- eee- ooo.” Everyone turned to look at him as if he’d farted. Just great. He’d never make more friends if he kept this up.

That afternoon, Travis hung out at Hil’s again. After last night, it would be a relief to play video games, knock off a few badgers—the badgers always gave him the fits, he could never nail them. But over sodas and cookies in the kitchen, Travis surprised himself by asking Hil if he’d ever read
A Wrinkle in Time
. Hil had; it was one of his favorites, all- time.

“Weird,” Hil said, and now he made the spooky-movie ghost noise, the exact same one, “Ooo- eee- ooo. I just started reading it again last night. Went to the mall with my mom and bought a new copy. It’s awesome.”

So Travis dropped the word
Camazotz
on Hil and told him about Bella Linda Terrace being like Camazotz, and Hil totally got it. They talked about the name Bella Linda Terrace, and Travis showed him that it actually didn’t mean anything at all, and Hil got that, too.

“The street names, dude,” Hil said. “Talk about weird. You live on Harbor Mist, right? You see a harbor, you see mist? No. And Grand Junction and Merrimack. Too weird. The streets should have names like Lettuce and Artichoke and Kale, all the stuff that grows around here. And this street? Serendipity. What does that mean?”

“It means—” Travis said.

“I know what it means, it’s like a coincidence or something. But what does it mean for a street name? You’re right, man, this place is weird. Now you know why I stay inside so much. Thank God for the pool.”

They took their sodas to the front porch and stared at the quiet, empty, and way-too-bright streets. It was hot again, and the afternoon wind was up and strong, but it felt good to be outside.

They spent the rest of the afternoon dreaming up a video game called Camazotz. In this world everything was gray and brown and blue, very dark, but perfect. The houses, the children, their games, all the same. Just like the book.

The heroes of the game, naturally, were two thirteen-year- old boys—each dressed in outrageous and colorful T-shirts and big goofy hats. They wandered through Camazotz with their Plink- Plunkers and Plink- Plunked the houses and children and balls, trying to locate hidden passages that led to cool and colorful and exciting worlds. There was a hidden world under every boring house.

They sketched five levels of the game—an underwater world, an inside- out world, a backward world, a world without gravity, and a world in which dogs were the masters—and they each shot soda out their nose countless times from laughing. They didn’t play a single minute of a real video game. It was the best afternoon with Hil since school had started.

Travis’s parents knew they’d screwed up. Big- time. When they came home at ten on Thursday night, Travis already in bed and reading, he could hear how sorry they were by the way they rushed up the stairs together, then opened his door slowly and quietly. They smiled big, fake, soft smiles. Travis stared at them.

“We’re sorry, kiddo,” his dad said. He sat on the edge of the bed and ruffled Travis’s hair. “We should have called, we know, should have told you we’d be late. I know, totally unfair. But I was in this big emergency meeting, and your mom had this killer report to do, so she just stayed. And … well …”

“That’s right, honey,” his mom said. She leaned over his dad’s shoulder. “We’re really, really sorry.”

It was like being in the hospital; his parents were doctors telling him he had an incurable disease.

“We know it’s been crazy lately,” his dad said, patting the bed. “And we haven’t been around as much, and, well, and …”

“And?” Travis said. It was the meanest question he had ever asked anyone.

“And tomorrow,” his mom said, “tomorrow everything’s clear, the slate is clean. Your dad and I will be home by six, won’t we? And we’ll go to Sheila’s for burgers, we haven’t been there in ages. And this weekend we’ll all hang out together. Hey, let’s spend the day at the pool on Saturday. Won’t that be great?”

“Okay,” Travis said. He said this with a little sulk in his voice. He was enjoying making his parents pay, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell them where he’d been while they were out. “But you promise. Sheila’s, and the pool, too?”

“Absolutely,” his father said. “That’s my kiddo. Now, you get some sleep.”

His parents said nothing about the library books scattered on the bed.

On Friday night, as promised, they went to Sheila’s, a funky bar and restaurant in Oldtown, where Travis’s dad had been a bartender before his new job. The burgers at Sheila’s were the best, and the French fries were simply unexplainable they were so good—French fries from another planet.

Sheila, the owner, made Travis a Roy Rogers with five cherries on a plastic sword; “his usual,” Sheila called it, and even though Travis thought it was a little kids’ drink, he still loved it. Some things shouldn’t change. Travis and his parents used to eat dinner here every Sunday night— always burgers and fries—and everyone at Sheila’s was happy to see them.

Saturday at the pool started out great. It was warm, but not as hot as it had been that week. A thin layer of feathery clouds softened the sky, and the wind didn’t come up in the afternoon. Tey took a picnic lunch and the newspaper and some books, almost like the old days at the library. But mostly they swam. And dived and slid down the slide. Maybe it was the clouds, but hardly anyone else was at the pool. Travis kept a lookout for Hil, but he never showed up. Which was okay, Travis decided. He was more than happy to hang out with his parents again, just the three of them.

But in the afternoon his parents began to drift away. His mother went back to the house to start dinner, and his father begged off more pool time and lay down under the big oak tree.

Travis swam and swam—he felt like he could live in the pool. At one point, for no real reason, he looked over at his father.

His father was sitting up and holding his BlackBerry, poking it with a tiny stylus.

Travis watched for a long time. While his father stared at the tiny computer, his face didn’t move at all, and Travis couldn’t tell what his father was feeling or thinking. He always used to be able to read his father, no matter what his mood. But right now his father didn’t look happy or sad or angry or interested or bored. He just stared.

Before the new jobs and the new house, life had been different at home. It seemed like their house was always full. His dad was there, playing music or helping Travis with his homework or just goofing around. His mom, too, who always came home right after her day of teaching third grade. Mostly everyone was home together, doing “ life stuff ,” which is what his family called the ordinary events of their lives.

His dad worked at Sheila’s a few nights a week, and sometimes he had gigs with the Not Band on weekends, and his mom occasionally had meetings at night, but the house was never empty. Even after his parents went back to college a few years ago, they were still around all the time. They had their regular jobs
and
homework, but they were home. Everyone was together.

Then they finished their degrees, got new jobs at the same software company in Gilroy, and moved to Bella Linda Terrace. Travis was really starting to hate their new life; it confused him. All that work to get new jobs to make more money to buy a big house, and they were never in that new house.

His parents told Travis they knew these changes were hard on him, but he was a big kid now, they said, and could take care of himself.
He
knew he could take care of himself, but he didn’t have to like it.

His father owned four guitars, two keyboards, a herd of harmonicas, and tambourines and other instruments to bang on—bongos, congas, egg shakers—as well as tape decks, speakers, microphones. All this equipment sat in the new garage, unpacked, pushed into one corner. Now there was only the BlackBerry; it had stolen his father’s brain.

His father set down the BlackBerry and called Travis out of the pool, time to go.

The house was filled with the scent of his mom’s spaghetti sauce and garlic bread, but she wasn’t in the kitchen. Travis called out, but she didn’t answer. She was in her office. He stood outside the office door and listened to the keys of her computer madly clacking.

Sunday was okay. In the morning they went shopping at the big mall north of town. It was a Pants Expedition, one of the funny ways Travis’s family shopped—one piece of clothing at a time, shirts or shoes or underwear. They’d shopped like this for years. Today it was pants, and for some reason they all found the word
pants
, even the very idea of pants, funny. They ate lunch at Rotten Roger’s Crab Hut, a cheesy chain place, and they all thought that was pretty funny, too.

In the afternoon they went to the pool again, which was much more crowded today. Even Hil was there, and he and Travis played Camazotz zombies, stiff - armed and brick-stepping off the high dive. When Hil and his family left, Travis and his parents sat under the biggest of the scraggly oaks around the pool, and they all read quietly together. His parents were starting to look relaxed.