Free Steinbeck’s Ghost by Lewis Buzbee

quarry against the mountains. When they counted the money in the cigar box, and added the money from the tip jar—Travis’s idea—it came to $578.44. That was a long way from eight million dollars, but it hardly seemedto matter.

    After the car wash, Travis and his parents went to Hil’s house for pizza with his family. It was the first time the two families had gotten together, and the talking just continued, about everything under the sun. It almost felt, Travis thought, like the old days. And on Sunday, both families hung out at the pool—wet again—a great day made a little bigger by the glow of the car wash’s success.
    But when dinner was over on Sunday and Travis went up to his room to catch up on homework—he was really behind—suddenly all the excitement was gone. His room was just his room, nothing more. He walked around it and looked at all his stuff , as if he were seeing it for the first time. His room and his life looked absolutely normal to him, and that’s what was weird about it.
    He had continued to live his normal life—going to school, watching TV, listening to music—but he had this other life now, and it felt more important than his normal life. It—Camazotz, the library, the books, Gitano, Steinbeck’s ghost—felt like his real life now. Hil was somewhere in the middle, sometimes a part of his normal life and sometimes a part of his real life. Travis didn’t know yet where Hil would end up.
    Yes, those were the right words,
normal
and
real
. They could have meant the same thing, those words, but there was a big difference, Travis felt. Normal was the everyday life, the dum-dee-dum-dum kind of life, the walking down the street but not paying too much attention life, the life the whole world lived. The real life was the wideawake, eyes-open, noticing-every-rock-and-every-shift-of-wind life, the life each person lived when they were most alive.
    In his Sunday-quiet bedroom, Travis stood suspended for a moment between his normal life and his real one. Which one should he follow? He didn’t have a choice, really. He’d have to follow both lives, live in both worlds.
    He looked around his room. Yes, his normal life was still there—there was his computer, there was his CD player, his basketball. He would wake up in the morning, and his normal life would continue.
    He looked at the stacks of books on his desk. These were his new life, his real life.
A Wrinkle in Time
led him to the library. Which led him to
Corral de Tierra
, which led him to
The Pastures of Heaven
, which led him to
The Long Valley
. And these books had led him to the other mysteries that surrounded him—Gitano and the Watchers and Steinbeck’s ghost—led him deeper into a world he’d never suspected.
    Books could do that to you. When you read, the world really did change. He understood this now. You saw parts of the world you never knew existed. Books were in the world; the world was in books.
    He sat at his desk and stared out at the Santa Lucias in the west. Tomorrow he would resume his normal life. To night he would read.
    He flipped through his library copy of
The Pastures of Heaven
, reading the first paragraph of each story, to remind him of what happened in it.
    Travis didn’t understand everything that happened in
The Pastures of Heaven
, but he knew enough. There was something dark in the stories, some kind of curse. Every family that moved into the Corral expected to find paradise. But they never found it, and often their lives were ruined—they lost their money and their farms, their honor, sometimes their lives. They had all wished too hard for a perfect world. He couldn’t help but think of Bella Linda Terrace, and he wondered if his parents had made the same mistake.
    When he looked out the window at the Santa Lucias, he didn’t only see the silhouette of the mountains. He saw into the past, saw all the people who had ever lived in the Corral, and all the stories about them. He also saw more deeply