Free Steinbeck’s Ghost by Lewis Buzbee Page A

into his own world, his own life.
    After a while he got into bed and opened
The Long Valley
. He’d read “Flight” a few days before, and there he found the Watchers he’d seen on the ridge behind his house. To night he started
The Red Pony
, the novella in the back of
The Long Valley
. It was all he could do to keep from crying when Jody’s foal Gabilan died, even though he knew that part was coming.
    He continued to the second section of
The Red Pony
, “The Great Mountains,” and found it was all new to him. He’d forgotten this part, about Jody and the mountains that obsessed him, which Travis now knew were the Santa Lucias. Jody was always looking off toward these mountains, the same view Travis had from his bedroom window.
    Then the book almost leaped out of Travis’s hands when an old stranger arrived on Jody’s father’s ranch. The stranger was an old “paisano,” half Mexican and half Indian, and he claimed that he had once worked on the ranch. The first thing the old paisano said in the story was, “I am Gitano, and I have come back.”
    Travis dug himself deeper under the covers and kept reading.

    In
The Red Pony
Gitano spent much of his time looking at the Great Mountains, the Santa Lucias. When Jody asked him if he’d ever been there, Gitano told him that, yes, he had been there, once. But it was a long time ago, when he was a child. Had he ever been back? Jody wanted to know. No. What had he seen there, in the Great Mountains? Gitano refused to talk about what he’d seen.
    A noise broke Travis’s reading. But from where?
    Travis sat up, looked around his room. The noise— whatever it was, a snapping twig, a door clicking shut— could have come from anywhere. In the fresh silence, Travis heard the echo of the noise. It might’ve come from the front yard or from inside the house. It might have come out of the book.
    He floated through the house. Not a whit of noise, not even his father’s incredibly loud snoring.
    The memory of the noise, the echo of it, called him outside.
    He put on shorts and sandals, went down to the garage, and slipped out the side gate on his bike. Like most kids, Travis knew how to sneak around at night undetected.
    The houses of Bella Linda Terrace were bonewhite in the harsh glow of the orange streetlights and the white cloud of almost- full moonlight. To night every house seemed even more like its neighbor than before.
    He shot through the front gate of Bella Linda Terrace and crossed Boronda Road. He pulled up in front of the barbed wire fence that bordered the neighboring foothills. He stared into the world in the night. He wanted to move past the fence, but couldn’t.
    Were the Watchers at the top of the ridge again? He couldn’t tell. Something was up there, shapes moving across the blue- green hills.
    He turned to go home. There was Bella Linda Terrace, Camazotz, waiting for him. He had a sudden thought. Did the high stone wall around Bella Linda Terrace keep people out, or keep people in? It was hard to know. Everything looked different under the sodium lights.

SIX
    T RAVIS COULDN’T WAIT TO GET TO THE LIBRARY AND SEE MISS BABB. At school that day, he’d come up with a great idea for the committee to consider.
    He was staring at a poster of famous writers behind Miss Galbraith’s desk in third- period En glish, when it struck him. He didn’t know who all these writers were, but it was the photos of the writers that inspired his truly simple thought: Writers were real people. At least before they were dead. He knew this thought was connected to Steinbeck’s ghost. Seeing Steinbeck’s ghost in the attic window had made him realize that writers had been kids once, had grown up somewhere, and were only writers when they sat down to write. They didn’t just live in photos on the backs of books.
    And if writers didn’t care about libraries, then who would? Travis thought the committee should invite famous writers to put on a benefit reading for the