Pluto's Ghost

by Sheree Fitch

  “Open up?” I said. “Sure thing. See me opening my mouth up wide.”

  “Jake!” she said.

  “Say AHHH!”

  She almost smiled. I sniffed and went on.

  “Give me a fuggin’ break,” I said. “What? I said fuggin’. Guh. Guh. Hard g, okay? This theory you experts have about how you can change your life by thinking positive thoughts makes me want to puke. Many times. Hurl green chunks like in that exorcist movie. No happy thought I ever had or will have can bring my mother back from the dead. Or anyone else for that matter either. So this so-called healing power of narrative you got there in this brochure sounds like a load of touchy-feely crapola to me. Hippy dippy drippy shit, as my friend Teddy would say.”

  “Would you at least try?” she said. The woman had stamina, I’ll give her that.

  “If you stop asking me so many irritating, senseless, long-winded freakin’ questions, okay, okay, all right already. Jeez.”

  d

  A few warnings here: Besides sniffing the world to understand it and hearing words like musical notes and sometimes seeing shapes and colours mix together depending on my mood—like is your word for circle orange and warm, or cool and furry and blue like mine?—besides those little weirdnesses, I have a few other challenges. I like that word, challenges. It ba-booms like a bowling alley, and I think also of the board game Steeplechase. New word: Peculiarities. I’m a zigzag kind of thinker and talker. Z for zigzag and Zorro and looks like a whip made of leather. Zigzag. Kind of like my life. More side-to-side shuffle than a forward march. March is a word that hiccups and says something. Shhh. Huphuphuphuphuphup. March! So I do: two steps forward, twenty back. My tale’s a bit twisted. Rope. Tied in a noose. See what I mean? Already, it’s hard to keep up this talking on paper.

  Still, for Skye’s sake I’ll try the best I can to tell the truth straight up so help me God, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. Actually, that sounds like a better idea to me. Not great for the eyeball, but quick and way less painful. Small exaggeration but you get the point—pun intended. Groan if you want, but the thing is, this is a hard story to tell, not just because even though there’s no blood-sucking vampires or wizard kind of magic there’s still death and sex and violence and unexplained weirdnesses and putting it down makes it real which means no running away and no more hiding, but also the fact of the matter is that me being a tad on the dyslexic side I’m not much of a reader for sure but the writing, well, yeah, that just about kills me and I never know how to end one sentence and start another one as you can tell if you try reading this one out loud so I usually just put a period in when I run out of breath or run out of things to say like now.

  Used to make my teachers right crazy.

  I can still see Mr. Moore, my Grade Seven English teacher, sputtering and frothing at the mouth like a pit bull with rabies. I kid you not. Moore, with those shaggy fringed eyebrows swaying like palm trees in a hurricane over his popping-out eyeballs. Moore, with that orange-ish goatee that earned him the names Fire-Crotch and Scrotum Face. Moore, in his navy blue polo shirt and beige Dockers standing over me while I worked. Once, he pointed to a sentence and shouted, “For the luvagod, Jake, wheeeeere is your peeer-e-od?” I said, “Guess I’m late again,” and this sent all us guys in the class into nose-honking, snorting fits of laughter. Not so much the girls.

  e

  Sometimes my total lack of interpersonal intelligence embarrasses even me. My father says when I hit puberty all my good upbringing and sense of decency went down the toilet. Not true. I just can’t always filter my thoughts before they come bleeping out of my mouth is all. Some psychobabble folks have even suggested that the kind of comments I make in class illustrate my inappropriate passive-aggressive reflex response and my many emotional defects, including diagnoses of attention deficit, narcissism, and borderline personality disorder. These are all polite ways of saying that in the minds of many, I’m just a fug. F-u-g. That’s fug. As in majorly f*&#d up-guy. Personally I think all those labels paint all us subnormal beings with the same spray gun. I’m a label rebel and prefer the term mentally spastic. Now that, to me, is just plain funny and makes me think of my brain like a curled-up water hose kinked in all the wrong places. There’s that hose again. Maybe my brain’s more like a sprinkler. Full of holes. Leaking, spurting out so many ideas I can’t grab hold of one.

  Anyhow, even with no more Mr. Moore around to yell at me, from this paragraph forward you’ll see I’ll try to watch my language and use as many writing tools as I have at my disposal. My tools? A thesaurus, a word that reminds me of some kind of dinosaur, a grammar book here by a fellow by the name of Strunk and a leaflet on composition the English Department at Poplar Hills High gives out every year. Best of all, I’ve got Ms. Shepherd as my tutor. Ms. Shepherd (Shep to most of us) didn’t want me writing anything about her but it’s my story and so she admitted I could exercise freedom of speech and all that. Shep’s one dynamite teacher, looks fleecy as a lamb but appearances are deceiving. She hustles around as if she’s been busy somewhere else and is arriving somewhere late. She usually is. Her eyes are the aqua deep blue of the Arctic Ocean and they can go cold as that, too—if need be. Shep’s a no-bullshit-kickyourass type but she has to be. Young offenders, at-risk youths and even the hard-to-crack nutcases like me are her specialty. For some reason I’ll never understand she actually seems to like working with the likes of me. Yep, she does and she did, and so after I informed the sweet little Shrinkette about the embarrassing problem I have with my p’s being q’s and my q’s being p’s, she arranged for Shep to help with my telling. Shep agreed, saying I might be able to put it towards a credit in case I ever want to graduate someday. Also, she said, it might help me improve my vocabulary. So there you go. Shep. Tutor and editor. Kind of like my ghost writer.

  Maybe I’ll call my story “Last Hope for Dipsticks, Dummies and Other Geniuses in Hiding at the School of Lost Causes.”

  f

  I’m gonna hang up the bucket of shit I’ve been shovelling through,

  tell my tale, tell my hell,

  tell it true.

  Before

  I find my way

  Some sunshine day

  Back to you.

  Whoah. I almost forgot. Another warning: From time to time I plan on quoting myself as well as others. I’m a wannabe songwriter-singer even though I’m only now starting to learn the guitar and my voice needs a lot of work. As in I need to get one. I can play the harmonica half decent but still I’m a wannabe somebody but I’m nobody me. Also, as you will see, I got the green light—permission to use some of the entries from Skye’s diary. I have to so you’ll understand why I thought what I thought and did what I did. Or not.

  So this is also a lot of other stuff about Jacob Emmerson Upshore. I go by Jake. A Jake of all trades and master of none. A bit of a jake-ass, too. Sorry, that’s my dad’s Jake joke, not mine.

  I feel like I’m diving right down a jeezlus big sinkhole and entering a maze cave, about to face old ghosts. There’s a soundtrack playing. One of mine.

  I’m not complainin’

  I’m just explainin’

  I’m not excusin’

  But see

  I thought I was losin’

  my baby

  my lady

  my mind.

  g

  So. The gossip started up early the Wednesday morning down at the Cabin Diner in our one-horse town of Poplar Hills. I can just imagine those good old guys, the regulars, clearing the cigarette phlegm from throats, and I can almost hear their wheezy hacking coughs as they slurped their coffee. Louis Leblanc and the boys, sitting in their booth underneath a pair of antlers and a painted sign that read “Work-Free Smoke Place.” Those guys would have really stirred the pot of speculation that morning. Yep, I can just hear them.

  “What’s-gan-an? Ruthie and Skye. They just up and left?”

  “Yep, yep, yep, not a word to a soul.”

  “’Magine that, now.�
�

  “Vamoosed.”

  “Well, if that isn’t shit on a stick.”

  “Must be a song in there somewheres.”

  It was a scandal—excitement for sure. Our town’s claims to fame are Black Bear Brewery and the Lobster Roll Festival Days, held every July. Whoopdeedoo. Our local celebrity’s a dog, a border collie named Indigo. Some Film folks from Halifax did an award-winning documentary on his sheep-herding talent a few years back. Put us on the map for a spell. Other than that major excitement, Poplar Hills’ a quiet, tired little village that’s seen better times back in the days of shipbuilding. Quaint enough to tourists passing through, though “quaint we really ain’t” my dad loves to joke. Those tourist brochures make us sound like we’re a travel destination for horseshoe-playing senior citizens or lean, green organic-eating weather-faced kayakers and sturdy bowlegged mountain bikers and weekend hikers. “A quiet fishing village nestled in a harbour. Miles of breathtaking landscape along the Atlantic coast.” Well okay, sure, but take too deep a breath and you’ll smell our fragrant manure fields, the rich aroma of cow patties or maybe the rotten-egg sulphur smell of the paper mill over near Pictou. That’d be pronounced pick-toe and lovingly dubbed Toe Jam by yours truly in a song I wrote by the same name. I personally think the song has great potential if I do say so (and I do say so) myself.

  Who’s goin over to Toe Jam? I am I am.

  Who’s gonna do a body slam? I am I am.

  So let’s get hammered in Toe Jam

  It’s a slam bam hot damn boom-bamable night.

  Who’s ready? I am I am I am.

  Anyhow, you pretty much get the picture of where I’m from if you think of a pinpoint in the middle of a dot on a map. Gossip’s a local pastime and rumours usually whizz by like spitballs of fire.

  By the time I personally got the word on the why and the where about Skye and her mother it was noon. Word of mouth had turned cellular.

  I’d already done three hours of snow removal before school that morning and I was half asleep when those text messages started up. I’d been daydreaming about Skye, about how her hair smelled like green apples and her lips were soft and sweet as confectioner’s sugar, the kind my mother used to give me in a small blue china bowl every time she frosted her cakes. Lemon-butter icing over chocolate. Skye. My kind of sugar then and now. So, yeah, there I was feeling kind of warm and fuzzy, fiddling around with some new song lyrics, but then those words came over my cellphone, words that killed the music in my head.

  Knocked up

  Preggers

  Bun in the oven

  Skye Derucci’s pregnant

  What?

  Who’s the father?

  I thought for a split-second there I died. At least, I think I had some kind of heart spasm. Explosion in a mine shaft. Skye was pregnant?

  Jake Upshore?!!!!

  No way

  Jake and Skye—no shit—who knew?

  Smart girls like bad boys

  Jake is this for real? u there?

  Looks like you scored for once Jake

  Way to go daddy-o…

  h

  Daddy-o? O yeah, I was wide awake. Was this someone’s idea of a sick joke? I wondered. Like who believes anything on text is true anyhow? “Think before you act on any hearsay,” I could hear my dad saying, but when I looked up into the shocked and spotty faces of my classmates, I knew the situation I was facing wasn’t any kind of joke.

  Kitty Parsons chewed her big fat lower lip and crinkled her nose like she was smelling skunky roadkill. Brenda Hollis texted so fast she looked like someone with a nervous disorder, and beside her was Danny Mason. He sat up straight as an A student when he usually slouched like me, being the F he was. Marvin Jones winked at me with both eyes, goofy or what, and gave a thumbs-up. Randall Duke squeezed his temples instead of his pimples, and in the front row, rot-your-teeth-out-she’s-so-sweet mouse-faced Eleanor Appleby looked almost teary-eyed, as if she’d been peeling onions. Something was up all right. All around the room, everyone either avoided my eyes or gawked at me like I was a cross between a Komodo dragon and Jake the Ripper.

  I reread the messages. I swear the words sounded like tires screeching, and I heard this slamming head-on collision between my past and my future, the present be damned. In my head, a never-ending car alarm started up.

  Once, when I was a kid, I watched one of my dad’s friends, Abe Redding, sit on the edge of the board in the dunking tank during Poplar Hills’ Lobster Roll Festival Days. Some hotshot trying to impress a girl nailed the bull’s eye and folks cheered as Abe went under. Well, didn’t I feel like Abe just then. Except no one was laughing or cheering or clapping for me that morning. I was alone, going under, downwards and fast, plunging into an icy sea.

  “Hell. Holy old hell,” I muttered, sounding exactly like my worn-out old man. I pictured him finding out, imagined how quickly those sad, pouchy eyes would look away from mine. “Jakejakejake,” he’d say, three times like that, no space in between, as if by the third time he might have figured out what to say next. I pictured my father going to the refrigerator. He’d open it up, stare into it, talk to the juice carton, maybe listen for direction from some god who lived in the vegetable crisper. Then maybe he’d take out the peanut butter jar and get a spoon and start licking the spoon, swallowing real damn hard.

  “Kee-rist,” I said, in a voice so hoarse I felt like I had a mouthful of crushed gravel. I sent Skye non-stop texts—

  wer r u?

  r u there?

  hello?

  talk to me?

  wd u answer!

  yur killing me.

  babe, i’m dying here.

  r u pregnant?

  Nothing came back. Naythin. Diddly. Nadating. I squinted straight ahead and pretended to copy notes from the board. My head pounded and my pen stabbed the page. “Dear Dad,” I began. “I’ve got no excuse and we’ve been thru a lot I know.” This was an understatement. The list was endless. My badass resumé included what I prefer to call a few minor infractions of the law—trespassing, uttering threats in middle school, broken windows, possession of a joint, bootlegging, that shoplifting incident. Petty crimes. Then there was the mess-we-would-rather-forget I call my stunned act of Accidental Arson. I had a year or so of skipping school. Drunk and disorderly conduct in a public place. So you get the picture. I wasn’t the kind of upstanding young man you’d want your sister or daughter or best friend to marry. As the saying goes, my father sure had his hands full with me. I wasn’t the best one for communicating either. Here’s that note to him, for example, mistakes and all:

  Well, I don’t have to remind u I am sure. But all of it seems like nuthing compeared to this. Um. I got my girlfriend pergant pregant pregnant how about those Blue Jays, eh?

  i

  As my chem teacher, Dr. Jekyll, aka Mr. Rathburn, talked to the board and plunged further into his explanation of Boyle’s Law, I imagined myself petrifying into a human stalagmite. Still, I couldn’t deflect those laser-like beams burning into my back and my leg wouldn’t stop the Mexican-jumping-bean dance it was doing.

  Halifax

  they left last night

  y Hfx?

  Skye wanted the baby Jake said no way

  The familiar, distant rumble of some tsunami tantrum started up inside me. I balled my hand in a fist and tapped my right thigh fifteen times. A little de-escalating trick I’d been taught. I sat up straight, eyeballed by everyone in the room. Most of them were shooting nervous sidelong glances my way—looks as creepy as snakes crawling under my shirt. There was also a lot of coughing going on. More than one of them was making those fake scraped-shovel sounds of embarrassment. The texting continued.

  and so she’s having

  a u know

  abortion

  when?

  on Friday

  Abortion? An ugly word, and I still hadn’t wrapped my head around the fact Skye was pregnant. Picture a brick falling from the fortieth floor of a skyscraper and bash
ing in your skull. Blindsided. I was. The lights went out and I stared out the window into nothingness. Spikes of grass poked up in the fields beyond the school grounds like a whiskery stubble covering everything. Beautiful—it was, the way the sun lit everything up that morning. Those fields glowed. But how could the sun be so goddam shinyhappy at a moment like this? I wondered. Being the narcissist I am, I thought there should be a jeezluz cyclone swirling out there. This is all crazy-impossible, I told myself. “Almost impossible,” another little voice of mine taunted. “Don’t you remember what happened that night after the Valentine’s Day dance?” “But that was a month and a bit ago,” I reasoned back. “Do the math, dude,” said my voice of reason. “Do the math.” I did.

  “Just my luck,” I said out loud.

  “Just my luck.”

  “Who just swore in my classroom?” Rathburn spun around. No one answered but he glared at me before turning back to the board. Rathburn reminded me of a little robot man. He sniffed his chalk, shunted back and forth like he had a board up his arse and talked like there was a little taped recording somewhere inside his voicebox.

  His black-and-white monotone, his drone groan, his put-me-to-sleep tone i gotta go home home, I scribbled in the margins of my notebook—just for something to do.

  Whew awheeeheehhweee! A sharp, quick, low whistle sounded from the hallway.

  Like I’d conjured him, Teddy Brooks, otherwise known as Bulldozer, appeared outside the classroom door and signalled to me. There he was, my best bud, waving his arms around like he was flagging in a plane.

  “Come on,” he mouthed. “Hurry the hell up.”

  Teddy Brooks, throwing me a lifeline.

  “Can I be excused?” I blurted out, but my voice was so faint and hoarse I sounded like I was trapped underground, shouting out to be rescued.