Ghosts of Tom Joad Read online

  Published by Luminis Books

  1950 East Greyhound Pass, #18, PMB 280,

  Carmel, Indiana, 46033, U.S.A.

  Copyright © Peter Van Buren, 2014

  PUBLISHER’S NOTICE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design for Ghosts of Tom Joad by Rachel Marks. Cover image courtesy Shutterstock.

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-935462-90-3

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935462-91-0

  Printed in the United States of America

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  Praise for Ghosts of Tom Joad:

  “Politicians come and go, but the critical issues tearing at our society do not. In his new book Ghosts of Tom Joad, Van Buren turns to the larger themes of social justice and equality, and asks uncomfortable questions about where we are headed. He is no stranger to speaking truth to power, and the critical importance of doing that in a democracy cannot be overestimated. Standing up and saying ‘This is wrong’ is the basis of a free society. The act of doing so must be often practiced, and regularly tested.”

  —Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower, The Pentagon Papers

  “A lyrical, and deeply reported look at America’s decline from the bottom up. Though a work of fiction, Ghosts of Tom Joad is—sadly, and importantly—based on absolute fact. Buy it, read it, think about it.”

  —Janet Reitman, contributing editor, Rolling Stone, author of Inside Scientology: the Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion

  “At the State Department Peter Van Buren was a pioneer blowing the whistle in defense of human rights by challenging torture. In this novel, he blows the whistle in defense of America’s roots by challenging the dehumanizing consequences when big business abandoned the Rust Belt in Ohio. This tale of a mythical Earl’s relentless quest for an American dream that has become a mirage is worthy of the voices that inspired it, from Woody Guthrie to John Steinbeck to Bruce Springsteen.”

  —Tom Devine, Legal Director, Government Accountability Project

  “Van Buren is passionate about the truth, and his new book Ghosts of Tom Joad is a masterpiece, a must-read about the decline of our economy and social structure, an inspirational story showing how one man and one nation can claw its way back to greatness.”

  —Kathryn Milofsky, Producer Reporter ITV (UK) / Executive Producer of “The Brian Oxman Show” (US)

  “A twenty-first century Grapes of Wrath, this memorable volume documents in a concrete, personal, often moving way the despair among many in America today due to economic and family hardships. In the words of its fictional but all too real narrator—Earl, from a rust-belt small Ohio town, unable get a permanent job or start a family—‘they took away the factory, but left the people; this ain’t a story, it’s an autopsy.’”

  —John H. Brown, Adjunct Professor of Liberal Studies, Georgetown University

  “In Peter Van Buren’s Ghosts of Tom Joad, things do not always look better in the morning. In this autopsy of the new depression, you turn a page and keep reading, hoping the story’s left-behind people catch up … because one way or another, they’re us.”

  —Diplopundit

  “In Ghosts of Tom Joad, Peter Van Buren invokes his powerful storytelling gifts to portray a job-starved Ohio community. This gripping, contemporary novel in the tradition of The Grapes of Wrath is more real than real—and a worthy successor to Van Buren’s reporting about Iraq in his courageous We Meant Well.”

  —Andrew Kreig, Director, Justice Integrity Project

  “Ghosts of Tom Joad is a powerful and provocative tale of the working poor. Although the story is fiction, the themes are anything but. In a lively yet serious manner, Peter Van Buren tackles one of the most important issues of our day—how can a free society deal with the costs associated with creative destruction? Ghosts of Tom Joad is required reading for all concerned with the future of our country.”

  —Christopher J. Coyne, F.A. Harper Professor of Economics, George Mason University

  “Ghosts of Tom Joad takes a hard, honest look at where millions of Americans are today: living a marginal existence, a no-exit life of grinding poverty. What Peter Van Buren is able to show through his gritty, close-to-the-ground prose, is how capitalism destroys the human spirit, leaving its victims devoid of any purpose in life. Those of us in our sixties and seventies are completely bewildered at where the America of our youth—a very different sort of place from today—went. The answer is contained in the pages of this book: the values of ‘the market’ finally swamped everything else, destroyed any values except those of rapaciousness and self-interest. ‘I think God owes us an apology,’ says the central character of this novel. No, I’d reply; but America certainly does.”

  —Morris Berman, historian and author of The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire and Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

  “I can’t tell you what an impact this book had on me. The writing is beautiful, but the story is brutal. I grew up in and around these places, and to say it is grim is an understatement. Ghosts captures everything—the human complexity and the profound cultural/economic damages. The story stuck with me long after I stopped reading.”

  “I grew up and later worked in a ‘Reeve, Ohio.’ While experiencing a visceral recognition, Van Buren’s intimate portrait of this dying town made me feel like a stranger peeking in on places many Americans have no idea exist. I will never again drive by the old manufacturing towns of my youth without wondering about the shadows within, as drawn so mesmerizingly in Van Buren’s relentlessly vivid portrayal. As Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath made a place for the Dust Bowl in our literary canon, Ghosts aims to do the same for the devastating industrial decline of the late-American 20th century.”

  —Kelley Vlahos, The American Conservative

  “Bottom line: It’s accessible and compelling, a mix of Canterbury Tales meets Grapes of Wrath meets American Beauty.”

  —Charlie Sherpa, military blogger, Red Bull Rising

  “Have and have-nots have always existed. Ghosts of Tom Joad brings this conflict so often touched upon in literature into a modern day, down-turned economy. Riveted with a bit of nostalgia for the rosier ’70s and ’80s, the story manages to find humor in an otherwise dismal life. When you choose to ride this bus with Earl, you’ll find yourself reminiscing with him, rooting for him, and yearning for the release he strives to find.”

  —Lisa Ehrle, Teacher-Librarian, Aurora, Colorado.

  “Haunting and a kick in the gut, Peter Van Buren’s first novel, Ghosts of Tom Joad, lays bare the brutal and very personal reality of America’s Great Recession. In his first book, We Meant Well, Peter blew the whistle on the catastrophic effects of American policy in Iraq; now Peter turns his necessary and just attention on the effects of American policy at home. Want to understand the true and honest nature of our modern society and the American way of life? Then read Ghosts of Tom Joad.”

  —Matthew Hoh, Peace and Veterans advocate, former Marine

  “Peter Van Buren has an amazing ability to draw the reader into his stories. That the author of the definitive work on the debacle of our post-war reconstruction of Iraq has now set his sights on the debacle of our post-industrial America makes perfect sense. Many of the actors are the same, with the same intent.”

  —Daniel McAdams, Ron Paul Institute

  “Like his heroes in Steinbeck and Agee before him, the author takes us on an unflin
ching tour of America’s ‘broken places,’ yet true to his predecessors Van Buren never loses sight of his rough characters’ resilient humanity, their deeply held yearning for the grounding connection of family and community, their stubborn hope for a better life. An urgent, important story, and an incredibly necessary book.”

  —James Spione, Academy-Award nominated documentarian, Incident in Baghdad and Silenced

  For Woody—this book kills fascists.

  Prologue

  LET THE YOUNG men in other small Ohio towns dream of bright lights. In Reeve, Ohio we knew growing up we were going to work in that factory. We said, “Graduate today, factory tomorrow.” Life was rich, fat, happy enough. But we thought that factory in Reeve was drawn in ink, when it was really watercolor. After she closed on us, I was a telemarketer. A tire salesman, one McJob after another. Christmas help. The development that had been planned for Reeve, the one that was gonna bring in big retail stores and jobs for everyone, fizzled on some complicated six-way derivative financing deal, and so, long after they tore down the factory, the land stayed vacant. There were pieces of machinery from the factory left on the ground, too unimportant to sell off, too heavy to move, too bulky to bury, left scattered like clues from a lost civilization, droppings of our failure. Might as well been the bones of the men who worked there. I think God owes us an apology.

  I climbed out of the foxhole to see almost every one of them running in circles, throwing snowballs at each other and shouting, laughing and throwing some more snowballs. Boredom and young boys do not mix well and after what seemed like forever doing nothing, we had found something. I packed a tight one, pulling off my gloves so as to let my hands melt the snow enough to form an ice ball. With some element of a practiced eye, I hurled that snowball as hard as I could at some boy about twenty yards away, smacking him straight on his nose. He looked over at me more surprised than anything and when I saw him laugh, I laughed too and went over to make sure there were no hard feelings. His nose was bloodied all right, as I had something of an arm back then, with the red blood dripping on that white snow. As he laughed, his head moved, flinging the drops of blood in a wider circle around us both. It was kinda pretty, the red and the white, the drops giving off a tiny bit of steam and melting just a tiny bit into the crust of the snow.

  The CEO of Wal-Mart’s hourly wage works out to $8,701. An entry-level Wal-Mart clerk in Arkansas makes six bucks an hour, below minimum wage, because she’s a trainee under local law.

  In a decent world that would have been the end of that day. I would have walked home, had dinner, maybe asked my own father about what had happened. Going to bed and waking up the next morning usually solved problems in the small town of Reeve, Ohio, as many times the smell of a new day absorbed what had passed the night before.

  In the last thirty years, the share of national income of the top one percent of Americans doubled. For most of the remaining 99 percent of households, the share went down.

  But I was not there, I was as far away from there as it was possible to be, and so I heeded the Sergeant and ran to my hole. Whatever that man knew about whores and cursing, he did know equally about the real side of war that had just been visited on me, and so I ran to my hole and, following his shouts, prepared and aimed my rifle forward, expecting the North Koreans or maybe Satan himself to emerge from those woods.

  At the time of the fall of Rome only two thousand people owned all of the land between the Rhine and the Euphrates rivers. In 2014, 85 people own half of the world’s wealth.

  There is nothing in the world that sounds like a mortar. We did not know whether it was the noise we made, the movement we made on Hill 124, or simply one of those coincidences that caused mortar shells to fall on us twenty or so boys making snow angels. We did not know if the mortar shells were fired by our men, North Korean men, or spit out by an angry God, but they did fall on us. The snow did its job, deadening the sound of the explosions, catching some of the shrapnel, which, white-hot, made some tiny puffs of steam as it melted through the snow crust, and then absorbing the fluid of several boys, one from Indiana recently suffering from a bloody nose. I was fine, not hurt, just watching the impressions of snow angels fill with blood around me as Hill 124 tried to kill us.

  (Me now, inhaling, deep breath. Remembering’s the only thing I got left. Click. BANG. An alarm clock goin’ off.)

  A Snowball’s Chance in Hell

  THE LONGEST DAY of my life started when I accidentally shot myself. Went downhill from there, as you’ll soon see.

  Don’t feel bad for me, though I probably have a snowball’s chance in hell. And that’s sort of okay, I guess. I’m Earl, and I’ve been riding a bus around my hometown of Reeve, Ohio. My nerves was fragile as the sound of boots on cold gravel and, to be fair, at some point I was just seein’ unhealthy shadows, like standing up too quickly, head tingly, and was resigned to riding this bus all day and night. The road to Hell now has bus service. Squeal, whoosh, doors open with a puff of inside-outside air changing, people get on and off, and I sat here. It was something to do, a way to pass the time since I couldn’t find steady work. Safe, steady in its own way, like old black and white shows on the TV. It’s not a bad life, or it wasn’t, until today.

  See, at one point there were patterns that made simple sense as the Driver followed the same route around town. The doors would slap open and closed, reminding me how when I was a baby, my mom, I guess, would push me on the swings sayin’ “Back and a-wwwway, back and a-wwwway” as I swung. We weren’t that small of an Ohio town anymore that everyone knew where to go, but we weren’t big enough that you were afraid to talk to a stranger on the bus.

  And that’s part of what made this day on the bus different, the strangers. For the most part, I knew them only as Fat Guy with Laptop, in his shirt like a sausage casing, or Woman with Noisy Child, or Old Man with a face like you’d see in a commercial for gas bloat medicine. A lot of times too, I saw a young Korean boy in the back of the bus, shadowy places under his eyes that one, kinda scary if a kid could be scary. Never said anything, probably didn’t speak English, but a lot of them had moved to town. Then, somehow, the people on the bus became more familiar—really familiar—until even I had to recognize that I knew almost all of them.

  Or had known them—most of the folks who get on the bus with me have been long missing from my life of fifty-two years. Now they were coming and going, even talking to me, just as if it was no big deal that they were like ghosts. It was like having a super power. I was the Hulk of mental illness. It’s one thing to hear voices in your head telling you to love some famous actress or smear purple paint on your chest, but it’s another to run into both your mom and your old girlfriends in living color on a bus. But it seems everybody you run across in life you drag forward. You can’t help that. They’re all on the bus with you.

  It is quiet now, and we’re about to stop for someone. This happens all the time. I’m envious that they get to climb on and off, when all I really would like is to finish this ride. That’s the last big question I got to answer: how to get off this bus.

  My best friend from high school, Muley, got on and sat down behind me. His real name was Thomas, but only his mom and Mrs. Garrity the English teacher who said she believed in him called him that. Most of us called him Muley, an unfortunate leftover from an unfortunate puberty thing in sixth grade. In towns like this we don’t forget, but we do compensate. Just like my friend Rich, who moved in to Reeve from Gibbsville, and who twelve years later was still known as the new kid, and always will be.

  The summer of 1977 was the hottest one any of us not yet old remembered. Old people always remembered a hotter one from some ancient time like 1950, but we rarely listened to them except politely at Sunday dinner and even then only as long as the dessert and Mom’s vigilance lasted. Hot summers were good for corn, but for people the heat and the awful Ohio humidity ate away at you, especially before air conditioning when you had to live in the weather. It was a big, damp towe
l over everything. The waves of heat and humidity would break with violent thunderstorms, also good for the corn.

  I do a lot of remembering on this bus. I was just remembering our old house here in Reeve, Ohio used to have a porch, where Dad and Mom would sit out and drink lukewarm beer. Over the years, the story changed to iced tea or lemonade, but I clearly remember him saying beer often enough and, when I got older, mentioning nips of whiskey from a bottle he kept outside under some cushions for when Mom stepped off the porch to visit with someone. After everybody got their air conditioners, the porch filled with bikes and lawn equipment. Then Mom and Dad, they moved ’cause Dad lost his job, town factory closed down. That was a real sack of it.

  “You remember that last summer, the one between junior and senior year?” Muley asked me on the bus. I hadn’t talked to him in years, but I quickly was adjusting to talking to long-missing people who happened to be riding my bus. That summer was a while ago, the year the first Star Wars came out and everyone was saying “May the Force be with you” all the time. “Jeez, people still say it now, lame,” said Muley. In 1977, a fat and weepy Elvis was dead and we listened to Kiss and Alice Cooper in a not-then-ironic kind of way. We lived in Reeve, Ohio. Reeve isn’t really on the way to anywhere, but is located between Clyde and Gibbsville, places people seem to know better, to give you an idea where it was. Not too far from Columbus, the nearest actual really big city.

  Muley had one of those smiles that when he got around to grinning would bring you in. He otherwise maintained a kind of glazed look, like school pictures. Sometimes he missed the point, which was part of what made him funny. I remembered swimming in the river with him, a bunch of us really, a couple of days before high school football practice would start. Six packs of Little Kings, where you lost half the beer to foam just opening them in the heat.

  “Wait guys, I’m thinking.”