Steinbeck’s Ghost by Lewis Buzbee Page B

town of Spreckels on a field trip, and it had felt almost like a ghost town or a deserted island. Is that why Oster lived here now? To be away from everyone and everything?
    He glided off 68 onto Spreckels Boulevard and, sheltered from the wind by a tunnel of towering sycamores, coasted down a long slope toward the factory. Was everything here called Spreckels? Maybe the school’s soccer team was the Spreckels Spreckels.
    He stopped in front of the factory’s main gate. The factory had been closed for several years, but a few cars and trucks still motored about behind its chain- link fence. Up close, the grand structures of the factory seemed much smaller than when he’d first seen them from far away. The Santa Lucias behind the factory turned it into a more ordinary place.
    Travis cut into the town, speeding past stucco bungalows and weathered Victorians, all with wide porches.
    222 Third Street was practically hidden. Pale green juniper hedges blocked the view of the porch, continuing around the sides of the house and covering all the windows. It was a blue- gray house with white trim. That was about all you could say about it: a house. It didn’t look like a writer’s house, for some reason.
    Travis circled in the middle of the street for a while, unsure why he was so hesitant. He was meeting a stranger, yes, that could always make you nervous. Maybe Oster was one of those weird recluses—
recluse
, that was the word—who had holed up in his house for decades, hoarding old newspapers and used aluminum foil. But Miss Babb knew him, and she would have told Travis if he needed to be careful.
    No, what troubled Travis was that Oster wasn’t really a stranger. He was the author of one of his favorite books, one he’d read a gazillion times. Travis felt as if he’d spent years crawling around in Oster’s brain. He knew how Oster felt about the world—the trees and the hills, the weather and the sunsets, the crazy and wonderful and sometimes cruel things people did to one another. Oster, through his writing, had helped Travis to become who Travis was. Oster was no stranger. And yet.
    The wind crisped through the leaves of the sycamores that crowded the streets. A chill crept around the edges of the afternoon, the shadows longer today. Autumn was here.
    Travis hitched his bike to the white fence of number 222.

    Ernest Oster, the writer, had indeed made fresh lemonade. With real lemon wedges floating in it. Travis could smell, and then taste, summer in it, high summer, the first week of August. When he took a sip, he could not help but close his eyes.
    The lemonade was the only brightness in an otherwise dark living room. Two table lamps only seemed to make the shadows in the corners of the room more shadowy. It was a quiet house; it reminded Travis of his grandmother’s house in Santa Maria, everything old and perfectly in place.
    They sat in two green overstuffed chairs that half faced each other.
    Oster was a smallish man, not much taller than Travis, and he seemed like his voice sounded: quiet, guarded. He wore dark blue slacks, polyester, and a light blue short- sleeved shirt, also polyester, with a white T-shirt underneath. His shoes were black and wanted to look like dress shoes, but they had tennis shoe soles. Short, white socks. His hair was gray, trimmed close. Square, silver glasses shrunk his blue eyes; he seemed to be squinting all the time. He would have made a good math teacher, Travis thought. A math teacher for the air force.
    Oster didn’t look anything like a writer. Travis supposed he’d expected him to look something like Steinbeck, or like the photo of Hemingway in Miss Gal-braith’s class, on safari, holding a rifle, one boot propped on a wild boar.
    “So,” Oster said. “I suppose Charlene has sent you. Come to roust out the old recluse, have you?” That word.
    “No, sir,” Travis said. “She, uh, wouldn’t tell me where you lived. Said it was a secret. I found you myself.”
    “You