Steinbeck’s Ghost by Lewis Buzbee Page 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