Steinbeck’s Ghost (20 page)

The first thing Travis saw when he walked in the house was his father’s shirt. It was hanging off one of the kitchen stools, which had been placed squarely in the entrance to the kitchen. The shirt was obviously meant to be seen.

If this were a book, Travis thought, he would … But no, this wasn’t a book.

The front door slammed behind him, pushed closed by the wind. He sensed, deep down, that his parents were waiting for him in the kitchen. Was it their breathing, the heat that came from the kitchen, made by their bodies? What sixth sense told him so? He froze in the front hall.

“Travis,” his mom called. “Would you come in here.” There was no question mark at the end of that sentence.

He’d never known that the front hallway was so incredibly long. Didn’t know that the white, plastered walls were so fascinating.

But the hall did end, and there were his parents, seated on stools that faced the shirt, as if the three of them had been having a nice little chat. His mom and dad were each holding a coffee mug, a sign; what ever was coming was serious.

“Yes?” he asked. For now, the less said, the better.

“Travis,” his mom said. She looked him straight in the eye. He tried not to look away. “What is this?”

“That’s Dad’s shirt.”

He looked at his dad. It was no wonder his dad wasn’t talking. He looked so tense Travis thought the coffee mug might splinter in his hands.

“Don’t get smart with me,” his mom said. There it was, proof. Trouble had arrived.

“It’s my Halloween costume,” Travis said. He looked at the floor. Where else could you look? “I’m sorry.”

One long silence. Then the sound of his dad’s coffee mug being set down, gently.

“Sorry?” his dad said. “Sorry? Is that all? Sorry? Well, I’m sorry, too, because sorry ain’t going to cut it today.”

Travis found it difficult not to laugh. But he managed.

He looked up, and as he feared, his father was glaring at him.

“I just—”

“Just nothing,” his father said. Travis looked at the floor again. “You ruined that shirt. It was brand- new. It cost seventy- four dollars. What were you thinking?”

What he was thinking was that his father would never have been so angry as he was now, not in the old days, not before the move. Not happy, sure, but this was beyond not happy; this was straight- up anger. And Travis couldn’t believe his father had thrown the price of the shirt at him either. When they had no money, money didn’t matter, but now that they did, it seemed way too important.

Travis waited. His father appeared to be done talking. For now.

“I needed a shirt for Halloween.” He paused. Went on. “And this was the only one I could find that worked. It was getting late.”

“Travis.” His mom slipped in quickly. “Why didn’t you ask us? We could’ve helped you.”

He knew he shouldn’t say what he was going to say. He knew the “discussion” would only get bigger and louder if he said it. But he couldn’t help himself.

“Because you weren’t here,” he said. He wasn’t looking at them, or at the floor. He looked past them, to the backyard. Dusk was giving way to true night. At least he’d made it home before dark.

“We were at work, you know that,” his mom said. “You can always call; we gave you the cell.” She was trying to soften everything, but it was too late.

“I know,” he said. “You’re always at work. That’s the problem.”

“Now, sweetie,” his mom said, softer than soft.

But his dad crushed all the softness in the room.

“No, no, no,” his dad said. He stood up. “No, that’s not the problem. The problem is, you weren’t thinking. You ruined a perfectly good shirt, and there’s no excuse for it.”

His mom cut across his dad again.

“Travis, honey,” she said. “You know we’re doing the best we can. Yes, sometimes we have to work late, but—”

“No, not sometimes,” Travis said, and he stared at his mom and then at his dad. “Every time. Every. Single. Time. That’s all you do anymore. Work. This sucks.”

His father took a deep breath.

“And who’s going to pay for this house if we don’t work?” His father sat down, trying to look reasonable.

“What does it matter?” Travis said. His arms were starting to wave about. “You have this big old house but you don’Theven live here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Travis?” His mom’s voice was soft again. Maybe if she talked softly enough, Travis would stop waving his arms. “Don’t you like it here?”

He didn’t have to think.

“No,” he said. Too late: He was shouting. “No, I hate it. I hate this stupid house. And I hate this stupid place. I mean, c’mon, Bella Linda Terrace? What kind of a stupid name is that? I hate it, I hate it, and I hate you.”

And he was up the stairs and in his room, the only sound in the house the echo of the slammed bedroom door.

In books and movies at a time like this, one of the parents usually whispers, “Let him be now, he needs some time alone.” But Travis’s parents weren’t like that. It was family policy during big arguments that the arguments get settled, talked out. No one got to hide.

Travis seated himself at his desk and opened
The Pastures of Heaven
to chapter twelve. He was pretending to read and doing a very poor job of it.

He didn’t know how to feel. Part of him wanted his parents to stay away. That would allow him to get even angrier with them. There was a guilty plea sure in that feeling. But part of him also wanted them to come running up the stairs.

The echo of the slammed door died. Travis pretended to read one whole page of Steinbeck before he heard his parents’ steps. They weren’t running up the stairs, but they were coming.

They knocked on his door. He’d take that as a good sign.

“Come in,” he said, but he didn’t turn around.

His parents sat on his bed. He waited for them to speak first.

“Travis,” his dad said. “Listen. Let’s forget about the shirt for now, okay? I’m still mad, but we can talk about that later. There’s obviously something else going on here. Bigger things. Can we talk about those?”

“Sure.” He didn’t want to be crying when he turned around, but he was. They weren’t angry tears, though, these were tears of relief.

His mom and dad got up and came to him and hugged him. And it felt really great.

The three of them talked together for a long time. Travis told them everything he could, including things he didn’t know until he said them. He told them all about Bella Linda Terrace and Camazotz. He told them how much he missed their old life; no, not the old life, really, just the being- together part.

His parents listened. Carefully, he could tell. And then they talked. They knew, they told him, that the move and everything else had been hard on him. But they hadn’t realized how hard. In the end, they agreed with Travis. They were working too much.

And in the end, Travis agreed—surprising himself— that Bella Linda Terrace wasn’t all that horrible. He was actually starting to like it. A little bit.

They had delivery pizza in the kitchen, and afterward, they sat out in the backyard on an old quilt and ate tons of Halloween candy. Travis told them all about Halloween with Hil, and their costumes. And about the library. And as the night moved on, he even told them about Gitano and the Watchers, and the Corral, what he and Oster had seen. He told them about Hil and lying to Hil and how everything seemed so much better now and how happy that made him. He even told them about Steinbeck’s ghost.

Much to his relief, they didn’t phone the loony bin and arrange to have him tucked away in some rubber-padded cell. His parents thought it was way spooky, and urged him to go back. If he felt that what he was doing was safe, and if Oster felt the same way, then, of course, they wanted him to go back, to unravel this mystery.

“Would you feel better if we went with you?” his mom asked.

“No,” he said. “I mean, no thank you”—they all laughed—“but I think I better do this on my own. I mean, with Oster and Hil. But thanks. It’d be great, though, if you were here waiting for me when we got back. Just in case I have lost my mind.”

“You know,” his dad said. “I can’t say why exactly, but it makes me feel better knowing that Hil is going with you. That’s some friend you’ve got.”

Later, they all ran out of things to say, but it didn’t matter. Together, they watched the moon course through the sky. It was almost full tonight.

The next morning the rains returned. The whole house smelled of rain.

When he went downstairs, his father was still in his old pajamas, making pancakes. His mom was there, too, being waited on and looking as though she were enjoying every minute of it. Neither of them was in a hurry.

“What’s going on?”

“Well,” his dad said, flipping a pancake onto a plate. “I called in sick this morning. I don’t look well at all, now do I?”

“Oh, no,” Travis said. “You look terrible. What about me? Do I look terrible, too? Maybe I shouldn’t go to school.”

“You?” his dad said. “No, you look fine. You’re going to school. But your mom, now, she’s gonna start looking terrible around lunchtime. I think she’ll be completely under the weather by the time you get home.”

“That’s right,” his mom said. “And your dad and I are both gonna be sick all weekend. Terribly terribly sick. Not an ounce of work.”

Something had changed. Travis knew it. This was no empty promise. The argument over the shirt yesterday and the enormous one that followed, had helped his parents become unconfused. Travis saw it in their eyes, heard it in their voices. His dad was even wearing his ratty old pajama bottoms and an AC
/DC
T-shirt with great big holes in it.

The three of them ate breakfast together.

And when Travis came home from school, his dad was still in his pajamas and his mom was already home. She was in the garage planting bulbs in pots, and surprise of all surprises, his dad was in the living room playing music. He’d spent all day unpacking and arranging his gear.

“Jeez,” his dad said, “these cathedral ceilings have great acoustics.”

His dad showed Travis some new chords on the acoustic guitar, and they practiced Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” one of their favorites. His mom kept thinking up excuses to come back into the house and listen to them rehearse. She tracked dirt in from the garage.

Travis hadn’t seen a living room this messy in ages.

T
HE FIRST PLACE THEY TOOK HIL WAS THE CASTEL.
Oster pulled his old Dart into the country club parking lot again.

“But—” Travis said.

“You know,” Oster said. “I was really mad the other day when that guy kicked us out of here. And I’ve been mad since. I’m not going to let these people own everything, and the view, too. We have a right to see it. And there it is.”

The Castle hovered over the valley.

“Holy cow!” Hil said. He was sitting forward, his head hanging over the front seat. That huge Hil- smile.

They walked around behind the club house, back behind the kitchen. No one would see them here, and the view was spectacular, unobstructed. Below them a foursome swung furiously at little white balls. None of the golfers looked up at the Castle, not once.

Oster was telling Hil about the sandstone, how the Castle was created. Hil was asking two tons of questions.

The rain had once again left the air clean, filled with the scent of new life. In one week, so much had changed. The native sweet grasses were already sprouting under the dead stalks of last spring’s growth. The hills wore a thin but brilliant coat of new green. In a couple of weeks, with a little more rain, the color of the surrounding hills would put the fake- green of the golf course to shame. The rains were early this year, and heavy.

“Big T,” Hil was saying, suddenly next to Travis. “We have to go up there, get close to the Castle. It’s awesome.”

“Can’t,” Travis said. “Look at all the fences. These people bought it all up, put fences around it, and now they play golf. Look.”

Hil followed Travis’s hand along the fence lines. The golf course was fenced in, and beyond that, ragged parcels of land were fenced in, one from another, the fence lines reaching up to the impossible sternness of the Castle’s base. Everything around the Castle was owned, private property. But the Castle itself, it seemed, was too wild, too big to be tamed.

Hil was practically jumping up and down with frustration.

“It’s not fair, man,” he was saying. “Not fair at all. You guys are looking for a mystery, and there it is, big as a battleship. But it’s all locked up. That’s one gigantic gyp.”

He put his head down on the fake ranch- style fence rail.

“Dude,” Travis said, and patted him on the back.

“Gentlemen,” Oster said. He made a clicking noise in his throat, like a rider calling his horse.

Travis and Hil looked up.

“It’s true,” Oster said. “It’s not fair at all. But it happens all the time. They—whoever ‘they’ are, people with no imagination is my guess. Anyway, ‘they’ are always buying up the mystery and putting fences around it. They think they can own it, keep it all to themselves. And to a certain degree, they can, they do. I hate to say this, but it’s been going on forever. So much of the mystery—the beauty and strangeness of the world—so much of it has been bought and fenced.”

Travis thought of the stone wall around Bella Linda Terrace, how it kept things out and kept things in, too. The Corral, in Steinbeck’s version, refused to be fenced in, and that was why, Travis knew, the lives of the people who’d come here, in the stories at least, had all gone wrong. It wasn’t a curse that plagued the Corral, as much as the people trying to buy up and own—how did Oster put it?—the beauty and strangeness of the world. Maybe that was what was wrong with Bella Linda Terrace, the beauty and strangeness of the world hadn’t found a way through the stone wall just yet.

The three of them leaned on the fence rail and stared at the Castle. In the shortening light of the November afternoon, the Corral was painted with a golden wash.

Travis looked up at the mini- mansion planted below the Castle. It was new and perfect and huge, and stood like a conquering hero. Except. Except that the wooden fence along the back side of the property, a brand- new fence, had already collapsed in one section, collapsed under the weight of a small rockslide. A fence was no match for the Castle.

“Bu- ut …” Hil said, stepping back from the rail. Both his hands were turned up, and he wore an expectant look. He was waiting for the punch line.

Travis and Oster stared at him.

“Bu- ut …” Hil said again. He was rolling his hands, as if that would get his friends started.

Oster straightened up.

“But,” Oster said. He shot a finger at Hil, who smiled and crossed his arms. “But a fence cannot stop the mystery. Right?”

“Right,” Hil said. “Because you two guys …” And he rolled his hands again.

“We still found it,” Travis said. “Despite the fences.” “Precisely,” Oster said. “The way I see it, the people who put up the fences, because they’ve lost their imaginations, well, they only see the big things. They see the Castle and put a fence around it. And they forget to look in the small places. People like us, we know where to find the small places.”

“Show me,” Hil said. And they were off .

They drove through the Corral with the windows open. Hil, in the front seat now, was like a puppy out for his first car ride, his head hanging out the window.

They came to the end of the road, where they’d had lunch last week, but instead of stopping to eat, they hiked up the ravines toward the sandstone bluff .

Maybe it was the change the rains had brought, or maybe it was the fact that without a marked trail they wandered up a different series of ravines, but it all looked different to Travis today. The world was fresh, and the new green was everywhere.

They came to an open meadow high above the valley. There was a circle of gnarled oak around the flathexpanse of the meadow, but in the center of that circle of trees, one lone oak stood straight and tall. The trees that ringed it were bent and shaped by the wind and the steep slopes from which they grew. The lone oak was unshaped by the world, and because of this, seemed powerful, magnetic, more alive.

Travis, Hil, and Oster, without a word between them, headed straight for this tree and planted themselves at its trunk. They opened their packs and shared a meal.

While they ate, Oster and Travis filled in more details for Hil. Hil ate and nodded, and drew on the ground with a stick, as if figuring out a math problem.

Then, as often happens during a shared meal, a comfortable silence landed among them. It was out of this silence that Hil spoke.

“I recognize this place,” he said. “I’ve never been here before, but I know it. It’s inside me already.”

“The Corral can be like that,” Oster said.

Travis was happy listening to the two of them, watching how they were getting to know each other, these friends of his.

“It’s all your fault,” Hil said, looking right at Oster. It was an accusation, but a warm one.

Oster pulled back, his eyes wide, his mouth stuffed with tortilla.

“Me?” he mumbled.

“Yeah,” Hil said. “Your book. Travis made me read it. Finished it in one night. It’s way cool. I loved it. And I know this place already because you showed it to me first. I know what can happen here—crazy frog hunts and gnomes in the woods, all that stuff . I’ve never been here before but it’s familiar. Because of your book. I like that.”

“Thanks, Hilario,” Oster said. He looked away. “That means a lot to me. I guess it’s why people write books.”

“So,” Hil said. “Why don’t you write another one?”

Oster smiled.

“Well, I did,” Oster said. “But it wasn’t very good, I guess. I guess I only had one book. I’ll take that.”

“I know,” Hil said. “Big T told me all about it. But that was stupid. Just because one person said so, doesn’t make it true. It’s like those fences. You let that one person build a fence around you. Not fair.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Oster said.

Travis jumped in.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why don’t you write another book?”

“But I did,” Oster said.

“Listen carefully,” Travis said. “Why
don’t
you? Present tense. A new one.”

“What was wrong with that one anyway?” Hil said.

“They said—” Oster began.

“There’s that ‘they’ again,” Hil said.

“I think it was Steinbeck’s ghost. I’ve been thinking about it lately. It was the ghost I got wrong. ‘They’ wanted something simple—a ghost story, a murder mystery. A plot with an answer. So I gave them one. A green ghost who floated around and looked like Steinbeck’s corpse. Like Marley’s ghost in
A Christmas Carol
, you know, a specter. An apparition. I gave them what they wanted and they hated it. It was all wrong, and I knew it. Even back then.”

“How was it wrong?” Travis asked.

“Steinbeck’s ghost would be different,” Oster said.

“How?” Travis asked.

“His ghost would be bigger. He’d be a spirit, the spirit of this land, this valley. Or a tree, more likely. Steinbeck’s ghost would be the spirit of a great tree.”

They looked up at the tree.

“Like this one,” Hil said, no question in his voice.

“That’s perfect,” Travis said. “Why don’t you write that?”

“Maybe I will.”

They packed up their picnic and litter, and got ready to move on. Hil was busy inspecting the tree.

“Uh, Big T,” Hil said. “Someone named Jess has been up here. Look.”

He was pointing to a spot on the tree where three initials had been carved: ?
.
?
.
?
.

“Can’t spell his name either,” Hil said.

“That’s no name,” Travis said. “Those are initials. John Ernst Steinbeck.”

“Those could be his initials, I guess,” Oster said. “He used to come up here all the time. It’s possible.”

“I don’t think so,” Hil said. “Look, these are fresh. Brand-new.”

The wood where the bark had been scraped away was blond, still moist. The edges of the initials were sharp, clearly defined. At the base of the tree was a scattering of shavings.

“Cool,” Hil said.

It was then they heard the dry rasp of the rattler’s tail.

The snake shouldn’t have been there. It was too far from the rocks where it usually hid. And it was the wrong time of day, too early for hunting, and almost the wrong time of year, too late in the season. But there it was, not two feet from Travis and Hil. Much too close. Coiled and rattling. Anxious to strike.

Travis felt Oster’s hand on his shoulder, soft, warning. He heard Oster’s quick intake of breath, which, better than any words, urged him to keep still. He could not look at Hil, could only look at the snake. But all the same, he knew that Hil was frozen, too.

The tree breathed behind them. A cool breeze riffled the leaves. For a moment, even the rattler was quiet.

Travis’s knee twitched; dead grass crackled under his foot.

The rattle shook to life again, quick- quick. The snake’s head rose from it’s coil, back at first, away from them. Then it would snap forward, Travis knew.

The rock thwacked the snake’s head at that moment, the moment of lever, of swinging back to snapping forward. The snake fell away from them. Clearly dead.

It took several, well, seconds probably, but it felt closer to weeks, before Travis or Hil or Oster could move, turn to where the rock had come from. First they had to stare at the snake, watch its lifeless body sink into the dead grass and the new grass. Then they could breathe again.

They turned as one. The rock had flown in from behind them—they heard it smack the snake’s skull before they saw it on the ricochet. They didn’t have to think about where they turned to because something deep inside each of them, a deep and unthinking animal place, had perfectly reconstructed the rock’s trajectory.

At first, Travis saw only a big rock, about twenty feet away. He tried to look around the rock, but did not realize that what he was looking around was what he was looking for. The rock was a man. And this was no statue either, but a living, breathing person.

“Johnny Bear,” he whispered. “It’s Johnny Bear.” He spoke as quietly as if the man were as dangerous as the snake.

Hil said nothing, but Travis knew his brain was spinning.

Travis looked back to Oster, who turned to check that the snake was still dead, then turned back around.

“Thank you,” Oster yelled over the still meadow. “Gracias, mi amigo.”