Steinbeck’s Ghost (13 page)

They stopped in front of a weathered wooden shack on the bay side of the street. Cracked narrow stairs led to a plain, unmarked door. The windows wore blinds. Although the shack seemed abandoned, it was the only building on the Row that looked like it belonged here.

“Doc’s lab,” Travis said.

“The Pacific Biological Laboratory. Steinbeck called it ‘Western Biological’ in the books. Never figured out why he did that.”

Doc was Edward “Doc” Ricketts, Steinbeck’s closest friend, a marine biologist. He collected and prepared samples of local marine life for study in schools and colleges.

Doc’s lab was a stop on every aquarium field trip. The school group always stood outside the lab, while a docent told them about it. But the windows were always blinded, and the kids never got to go inside. Last year, after he’d read
Cannery Row
, Travis hung back when the field- trip herd moved on. He snuck down the sloping driveway and peered through a crack in the garage door. He saw jars and jars of pale white sea creatures suspended in clear liquid. Then he scurried up the stairs to the front door and peered sideways into the window. A saggy couch, glasses on a coffee table, an old record player. It was easy to imagine Doc and Steinbeck listening to classical music together and drinking Old Tennis Shoes whiskey. And talking, talking, talking.

A metal- gray seven- gill shark broke the surface of the deep, wide tank and snapped the pink chunk of salmon into its gullet. Splash and snap; silence. The shark swerved back down into the tank, threading through hundreds of other fish.

Travis and Oster were standing at the top of the giant kelp forest, looking down into it. Like a real kelp forest, the water here pulsed and surged with the bay’s tide. It was harder to see the fish from the surface, behind the scenes and above it all, but the view captivated Travis. All around them, pumps and pipes hissed and throbbed and gurgled.

Mike McKenzie tossed a last chunk of salmon into the tank. Seconds later, another seven- gill located the salmon and finished it off .

Mike was an old friend of Oster’s. They’d met just after he moved to Salinas and was beginning to research Steinbeck and
Corral de Tierra
. They became instant friends. Mike had been a volunteer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium since it opened in 1984.

Mike was one of those gruff adults—he spoke sharp and loud—who was just too nice to be truly gruff . In his khaki work clothes and knee- high black rubber boots, his hands on his hips, he could have been an army sergeant. But when he spoke—“a good snack- sized boy, this one, Ernest”—nothing could hide the smile in his eyes, the softness underneath the gruff exterior.

“Come here, Travis,” Mike said. Gruffly. He was squatting next to the edge of the tank. “Just put your first two fingers in the water and splash around a bit.”

Travis leaned forward to do so, but Mike grabbed his hand and pulled it back.

“They’ve already eaten. I forgot,” Mike said. All three of them laughed.

Travis stared down into the tank. The view from here was incredible.

The great kelp forest was a twenty- eight- foot- tall tank with three sixteen- foot- tall windows, an enormous viewing bay that surrounded aquarium visitors and towered above them. Travis always loved standing in front of this tank, watching the rockfish, the sea anemones, the sharks, the starfish, the abundance of sea life that lived in the real bay outside the aquarium walls. Standing in front of the tank, it was obvious why this ecosystem was called a “forest.” Long strands of seaweed, huddled together, rose from the rocky bottom of the seabed like the great redwood trees that towered over the earth.

The view from the glass side of the tank, the visitors’ side, was absolutely clear; it was easy to watch the forest at work. But standing at the top of the tank and looking down into it, the surface dipping and slapping, Travis realized that the view from the visitors’ side of the tank was more like a TV or a movie than the real, true- life ocean. From up here, Travis could, if he wanted, dive into the water, swim with the fish, be a part of the great flow of it all. This tank, like all the tanks in the aquarium, was connected to the ocean through a sophisticated pumping and filtration system. Travis imagined jumping into the tank and making his way through the pipeworks to the bay, and from there to the open ocean. This was no TV; this was the entrance to .the. real world.

“Okay, Mike,” Oster said. “Thanks for that part of the tour. We still on for the second half?”

The three of them were standing in front of a T-shirt shop that seemed to sell nothing but Hairy Otter shirts. The otters on the shirts wore round spectacles and had golden, lightning- shaped scars on their foreheads.

“Perfect timing,” Mike said. “I think we could all use a little refreshment, don’t you, Travis?”

He nodded. He had no idea what they were talking about.

“Excellent,” Mike said. “Gentlemen. To the lab.”

As they climbed the creaky stairs to Doc’s lab, Mike explained himself. When he was a kid, near the end of World War Two, he had worked for Doc Ricketts. He scoured the local tide pools for what ever creatures Doc needed—scallop, chiton, limpet, decorator crab. Doc paid him by the piece. It was a great job. When Doc died in 1946, the lab fell into disrepair, but an odd group of Row denizens came to possess the lab. It’s not clear how that happened, it just did; that was Cannery Row for you.

Mike continued to hang around the Row, worked in the canneries until they closed, and pretty soon—again, it just happened—he became a member of the Old Tennis Shoes Club.

The Old Tennis Shoes Club was a social club, if you will. They got together now and then at the lab, listened to music, talked about the world and everything in it, had a little nip of Old Tennis Shoes.

Travis knew about Old Tennis Shoes. In
Cannery Row
, that’s what the “denizens” drank. They bought endless bottles of it from Lee Chong’s grocery. Lee Chong’s was still on the Row, at least the building was; now it sold key chains. Old Tennis Shoes, according to Steinbeck, was a horrible whiskey, but it was cheap.

Mike had been a member of the club since, well, it must be forever because he couldn’t remember. The main goal of the club was to preserve the lab as it had been when Doc lived there.

“Did you ever meet Steinbeck?” Travis asked.

A fire was already going in an old woodstove. Travis and Oster sat on an ancient sprung- spring sofa. Mike brought in a tray of drinks for them—grape Nehi for Travis, shot glasses of Old Tennis Shoes for himself and Oster.

“Oh, a few times,” Mike said. He lowered himself into a ragged easy chair, took a sip of Old Tennis Shoes, and sighed loudly. “Heckuva nice guy. Snuck in here a couple of times before Doc passed. Snuck in a few times after, too. Still wasn’t welcome here back then. I remember one time he fixed the broken gear on my bike—with a cork and a safety pin. Forget his novels, that man could fix anything.”

Even though it was a fairly warm day outside, the wooden shack, built on pilings above the bay’s shore, was chilly. Waves lapped under the floorboards.

Mike got up and stoked the woodstove, then went over to an old- fashioned record player. It actually said Victrola on it, it was that old. He snapped on a green-glass- shaded lamp.

“Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue,’ one of their favorite pieces of music. Him and Doc would put this on, light up their pipes, and just talk. I never knew what they were talking about, but I sure did like the sound of it. It sounded important. I was just a kid then, but kids know what’s important, if you ask me.”

There was a knock on the door just as it swung open, and two men entered noisily.

“Chuy, Gil, c’mon in.” Mike did not stand, but raised his glass to them. “You know Ernest. And this young man is Travis. A special friend of the club.”

There were handshakes all around. Travis watched and nodded. It was clear what good friends these men were to one another, how long they’d been coming here, how they fit into the furniture. More shot glasses of Old Tennis Shoes were produced, and the stove was fed.

Travis knew he was sitting perfectly still, as calm as could be. But he also knew he shouldn’t be calm. He was inside Doc’s lab, sitting where Steinbeck himself had once sat, listening to men who had actually known the writer. But it was just a normal day at the lab. And the fact that everyone was matter- of- fact about it all made being here even that much more exciting. Travis smiled and listened, tried to be cool.

After a while Oster looked at Travis and tilted his head toward the door. It was time to leave, but Travis wanted to stay forever.

“Well, Mike,” Oster said. “It’s about time we got going. Still got time for a tour, though.”

“Absolutely,” Mike said. “But Ernest, you know the way. Why don’t you squire Master Travis? Old Tennis Shoes has some official business to conduct.”

Everyone laughed. Travis was pretty sure he knew why they were laughing—it had something to do with Old Tennis Shoes, the whiskey, not the club. So he laughed, too.

When he first came in, Travis had seen the open stairway door in the back corner, and immediately wanted to go there. The doorway, which led down to the basement, was one of those irresistible black caverns that seemed to pull you into it. All during the visit, he wanted to ask if he could go down there, but thought that would make him sound like a little kid. Can I, can I, can I, huh?

Now Oster was headed into the blackness, beckoning Travis to follow.

“Careful,” Oster whispered. “It’s dark.”

Not as dark as all that, though. Light from the late afternoon filtered into the basement. It was blue- gray down here, like being underwater.

The basement was a cement- floored workroom filled with high, narrow tables. Wooden shelves lined the walls, and on every surface of the tables and shelves, spectral shapes, as pale and luminous as the moon, floated in glass jars.

“This,” said Oster, “is the real lab. Where work actually got done. Go ahead, look around.”

Squid, starfish, shrimp, sea urchin—all the creatures Travis had just seen alive in the tank of the great kelp forest. Here they were, dead but preserved. Each specimen bore a typed label, the words faded to faint brown traces of ink. The specimens had to be at least sixty years old. There was a giant squid in a jar that was as tall as Travis. As dead as it was, it looked eerily alive. Travis got that horror- movie chill down his spine. He waited for the squid’s huge, open eye to wink at him.

The sound of the lapping waves was louder down here, and Travis realized that the back of the basement, which sloped sharply, was open to the bay. The water could come right in. It was like a garage for a world where the ocean was the street, something fantastic and almost unbelievable, something from his and Hil’s Camazotz video game. But this wasn’t a video game, it was a real building, solid and undeniable. Nearby, Travis heard the sound of a small outboard motor.

Oster showed Travis around the equipment— embalming tubes, a microscope, stainless- steel gutters for disposing of “waste,” a set of immaculate scalpels.

“Some of the specimens were shipped whole, then students would dissect them. And sometimes they were dissected here, used for their smaller parts. It looks rather brutal, I know,” Oster said. “But think of the good these specimens did. They helped train the scientists who are working to save the oceans today. And I’m serious. Progress is always a little ugly.”

“Oh, I know,” Travis said. “Steinbeck and Doc, they both loved the ocean. They thought we were ruining it and didn’t even know it. It’s where life came from, they thought.”

The sound of the outboard motor grew nearer, just outside the lab, and in an instant, the lab reverberated with the thock-thock rhythm of the motor and the sharp tang of gasoline exhaust.

Travis and Oster stared at each other, then they both stared at the opening to the bay. Neither of them moved, as if moving would make the noise noisier and the smell smellier.

The motor cut out, and Travis heard what he knew was the sound of a boat scraping up on the beach. In the silence that followed, there was a faint thud.

He looked at Oster, who was still staring out at the bay.