Steinbeck’s Ghost (9 page)

The next day Travis went straight to the library after school, and after an hour on the Internet, he’d come up with contact information for six of the possible readers on his list. But when he looked again for Ernest Oster, he still found nothing. All he found were five listings for copies of
Corral de Tierra
for sale. The cheapest copy was ninety- eight cents, the most expensive thirty- five dollars. That was all he found. Did Ernest Oster even exist?

Miss Babb was busy at the front counter, so Travis asked Mrs. Paonessa, one of the reference librarians, for help. She showed him a number of thick volumes on contemporary American authors, and some other guides to American literature, but there was nothing about Oster. It was as if he’d written one book and completely disappeared. Not one word anywhere.

But Travis knew he had to find him. It was too important. Oster and the library and Steinbeck, all these threads were braided together in Travis’s life now. Maybe meeting Oster—or finding him at least—could pull the threads of the braid together. Oster was such an expert on Steinbeck, he might be able to really help the library’s cause, maybe people would listen to him. And maybe, just maybe, he could help Travis figure out what was going on with Steinbeck’s ghost and the Watchers and Gitano. Maybe Oster was the missing piece. The trouble with any missing piece, though, was exactly that. It was missing.

Travis was sitting on the floor in front of the reference stacks, staring into what he thought was space. But the space came into focus, a white-and-black spine with the word
SALINAS
in nondescript type.

It couldn’t be, that would be too easy. He pulled the phone book’s white pages from the shelf and opened it to
O
.

Oster, Ernest. Spreckels. 989-1648.

Oh.

T
RAVIS SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE AND STARED AT THE PHONE.
He knew he was going to pick it up, knew he was going to call Ernest Oster. But then what?

Walking home from school, Hil asked Travis if he was going to come over, maybe they could work some more on the Camazotz game. Hil had finished
A Wrinkle in Time
and had new ideas for some of the hidden worlds. He seemed particularly interested in an Ice World. But Travis begged off . He had promised Miss Babb, he told Hil, that he’d do some research for the benefit reading. Hil volunteered to help, but no, Travis told him, that was okay, it was nothing much really. He’d be over in an hour or so. Cool, Hil said.

Travis continued to stare at the phone. In the backyard the afternoon wind hummed low, rattled the leaves of the young birch trees. He picked up the phone, put it back in its cradle.

He had no idea what to expect of Ernest Oster, or any other writer, for that matter. Before this—this thing, this mystery, this new, or was it renewed, life of his—Travis hadn’t given much thought to writers. Books had been books, things unto themselves. Even the photos of writers on their books seemed almost fake somehow, like the generic photos in department store picture frames. The writer didn’t seem to Travis any more important to the existence of a book than the threads that sewed the pages together or the glue that fastened them to the spine. The one writer he had always had a clear idea of—before all this—was Steinbeck, and that idea was based on a bronze statue, not a living, breathing person.

The phone just sat there. Travis punched in Oster’s number, but without lifting the receiver. A practice run.

Travis knew precisely three things about Oster: He published his first book in 1972; he was living in Salinas at the time the book was published; he currently lived in the small town of Spreckels a few miles outside of Salinas.

There sat the phone, dull black plastic around a bunch of wires and chips. Just sitting there. Travis wished the phone could make the call for him.

Okay, four facts. Miss Babb talked about Oster as if he were a spy or something. But what else did Travis know? It was the unknowing that made the call so hard to place. Oh, he also had no idea what he would say.

He picked up the phone and punched the numbers.

“Hello,” a man’s voice said softly, a little surprised.

“Hello,” Travis said. “May I speak with Ernest Oster, please?” Suddenly he was so polite. His parents would be glad to know that.

“Speaking.” The voice was wary, as if asking a question.

“
The
Ernest Oster,” Travis asked, “author of
Corral de Tierra
?” Nothing was coming out right. Travis knew he sounded like a bad actor playing a lawyer on TV.

“Ye-es?” The voice drew the word out, put a great big question mark on it. Travis could almost hear Oster moving away from the phone.

“Hi, I love your book and my name’s Travis Williams and I live in Salinas and I was, well, we were, I mean, the committee, the Save Our Library committee, I mean, I was wondering …” And the words kept pouring forth, and Travis had no idea what he was saying. But he was afraid to stop talking.

When he paused at a double um—“um, um”—Oster jumped in.

“Travis, is it? I’ve heard about the library. Terrible shame, truly. But I’m not sure how I can be of help.”

“Well, the thing is,” Travis said, “we thought that because your book is all about Steinbeck and the library’s named after him, well, we thought you could help. See, we’re putting together this benefit reading. And I was wondering if you would be one of the readers? It’d be great. Everyone loves your book.”

“Well, I’m not sure everyone loves it,” Oster said. “But it’s kind of you to say that. However, I really don’t think so. The book never did very well, you see, not even around here. I haven’t been a writer for a very long time. But thanks for thinking of me.”

No, no, Travis had to say something. If Oster hung up the phone, that was the end of it, Travis just knew. What did he mean, he wasn’t a writer anymore? That was crazy. Travis had read his book and knew Oster was a writer. You couldn’t just quit being a writer, could you?

“Oh, please, Mr. Oster,” Travis said. He couldn’t decide if he should turn up the whine in his voice or turn it down. You could never tell how adults would react to one’s whine- level. He turned it down, just to be safe. “See, the thing is, the library’s so important to our community. And as a writer, you know how important the library can be.” There was a tiny silence that needed to be bridged, so Travis jumped. “Maybe I could come out there and talk to you about it in person? Paint the big picture?”

Travis said this before he knew what he was doing. Good thing, too. What was he thinking? He waited for his answer.

Oster started a sentence, a disappointing sentence. “Well, this week is …” and then that sentence stopped. Travis listened to the silence that followed; it was like the pause between gears shifting on a bike. “Sure, why not? I really don’t think I can help you with the reading, but you’re right, the library is important. Maybe I can help you in some other way.”

“Great”—Travis couldn’t hesitate—“how about tomorrow afternoon, after school?”

“Sure. If you think you can get here all right? You know how to find me?”

“Piece of cake. Third Street, right? Around four thirty?”

“That’s fine. I’ll make some lemonade. See you then.”

Lemonade?

There it was, that easy. You. just picked up the phone.

The town of Spreckels sat tucked up against the western edge of the Salinas Valley, at the base of the sharp, black Santa Lucias. Corral de Tierra, which Steinbeck called the Pastures of Heaven, was just over the first ridge of mountains that rose up behind the town and the Spreckels sugar beet factory. It would take about an hour to get to Spreckels on his bike.

As soon as school let out, Travis zipped from Bella Linda Terrace into Oldtown, then down Main Street, which he followed out of town, where it turned into Highway 68, the road that led to Monterey and the ocean. As soon as he cleared the last houses and shops, the vast flat Salinas Valley spread out before him, a hundred miles south, nothing but acres of corporate farmland. The land was so fertile and its produce so abundant, Steinbeck called it “the valley of the world.” The strong scents of soil and manure were a cloud around Travis as he rode. In one of the fields, giant wooden farmworkers, painted in bright colors and shown at their tasks, stood guard. Behind them, real farmworkers, identical to their oversize wooden counterparts, worked up and down rows of iceberg lettuce.

The wooden cutouts of the farmworkers seemed like an insult to the real workers; the wooden figures were all smiling, and Travis was certain that the real farmworkers behind them were not.

Travis thought of Hil’s mom, who for most of her life had been a farmworker, sweating in the sun for very little money so other people with more money could have lettuce in their salads and tacos.

Travis’s grandfather and great- grandfather had both been farmworkers, too, arriving with the great Okie migration to California in the 1930s. Steinbeck had written about this migration in his most famous book,
The Grapes of Wrath
. Travis had tried to read it last year, really wanted to, but after a few chapters gave up. It wasn’t that the language was too complex, but he felt that the world it described was somehow too big for his brain. He hadn’t been ready then, but maybe he was now. Not only had he grown up a lot in the last year, but since he’d gone back to the library, he felt he’d changed several years’ worth in only a few weeks.

Coming up on a little rise, Travis saw Spreckels tucked up against the mountains. The blow-back from mammoth trucks shook his bike.

Spreckels was two things. First, it was the enormous sugar factory that seemed as old as the valley itself. The factory was a gated compound of smaller buildings, in the middle of which stood an enormous galvanized steel barn as big as an airplane hangar, and two bunches of even taller white silos. The enormity of the factory, especially seen against the flat farmland nearby, made it seem like one of the wonders of the world, like the pyramids of Egypt.

Second, Spreckels was a town. A company town, it had been built by the sugar company in the 1920s for its employees. The town was only three blocks wide and five blocks deep, and it was right across from the main entrance to Spreckels Sugar. It had one small store, a post office, a nice little park, and a school, and the rest of the town was houses. Spreckels was surrounded on three sides by endless acres of sugar beets and lettuce.

Travis had once been to the town of Spreckels on a field trip, and it had felt almost like a ghost town or a deserted island. Is that why Oster lived here now? To be away from everyone and everything?

He glided off 68 onto Spreckels Boulevard and, sheltered from the wind by a tunnel of towering sycamores, coasted down a long slope toward the factory. Was everything here called Spreckels? Maybe the school’s soccer team was the Spreckels Spreckels.

He stopped in front of the factory’s main gate. The factory had been closed for several years, but a few cars and trucks still motored about behind its chain- link fence. Up close, the grand structures of the factory seemed much smaller than when he’d first seen them from far away. The Santa Lucias behind the factory turned it into a more ordinary place.

Travis cut into the town, speeding past stucco bungalows and weathered Victorians, all with wide porches.

222 Third Street was practically hidden. Pale green juniper hedges blocked the view of the porch, continuing around the sides of the house and covering all the windows. It was a blue- gray house with white trim. That was about all you could say about it: a house. It didn’t look like a writer’s house, for some reason.

Travis circled in the middle of the street for a while, unsure why he was so hesitant. He was meeting a stranger, yes, that could always make you nervous. Maybe Oster was one of those weird recluses—
recluse
, that was the word—who had holed up in his house for decades, hoarding old newspapers and used aluminum foil. But Miss Babb knew him, and she would have told Travis if he needed to be careful.

No, what troubled Travis was that Oster wasn’t really a stranger. He was the author of one of his favorite books, one he’d read a gazillion times. Travis felt as if he’d spent years crawling around in Oster’s brain. He knew how Oster felt about the world—the trees and the hills, the weather and the sunsets, the crazy and wonderful and sometimes cruel things people did to one another. Oster, through his writing, had helped Travis to become who Travis was. Oster was no stranger. And yet.

The wind crisped through the leaves of the sycamores that crowded the streets. A chill crept around the edges of the afternoon, the shadows longer today. Autumn was here.

Travis hitched his bike to the white fence of number 222.

Ernest Oster, the writer, had indeed made fresh lemonade. With real lemon wedges floating in it. Travis could smell, and then taste, summer in it, high summer, the first week of August. When he took a sip, he could not help but close his eyes.

The lemonade was the only brightness in an otherwise dark living room. Two table lamps only seemed to make the shadows in the corners of the room more shadowy. It was a quiet house; it reminded Travis of his grandmother’s house in Santa Maria, everything old and perfectly in place.

They sat in two green overstuffed chairs that half faced each other.

Oster was a smallish man, not much taller than Travis, and he seemed like his voice sounded: quiet, guarded. He wore dark blue slacks, polyester, and a light blue short- sleeved shirt, also polyester, with a white T-shirt underneath. His shoes were black and wanted to look like dress shoes, but they had tennis shoe soles. Short, white socks. His hair was gray, trimmed close. Square, silver glasses shrunk his blue eyes; he seemed to be squinting all the time. He would have made a good math teacher, Travis thought. A math teacher for the air force.

Oster didn’t look anything like a writer. Travis supposed he’d expected him to look something like Steinbeck, or like the photo of Hemingway in Miss Gal-braith’s class, on safari, holding a rifle, one boot propped on a wild boar.