serial fiction

Delroy and the Cheese — a Tale of Tree-Planting and Obsession— Part One

In which we encounter both Delroy and the cheese

This is the first chapter of a series about life in a Canadian tree-planting camp. Feel free to comment either publicly or privately. I would love to get some feedback. The complete list of chapters is here.

Weather is like a child who cannot be ignored. When you spend your life outdoors, you may turn the bulk of your attention to something else from time to time, but the weather is never completely out of your mind. There is always a slight tinge of worry. Instead of “Is Junior playing with matches?” the worry is more like, “Is the sky going to turn black and pelt me with golf-ball-sized chunks of ice until I die?”

I hate the weather. At least today. At least this weather.

So far, there hadn’t been any ice, but sheets of rain had been dropping from the sky for the past two hours. Pouring on my head and down my neck and onto my hands and into the ground which was now the gooiest of goo. Every time I slammed my shovel into the ground I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get it out again. It was like demons in the earth were grabbing my shovel whenever it came near and holding on for dear life. The trees, they didn’t seem to be as interested in. Whenever I tried to slide a tree along the blade of my shovel, it stayed stuck to my glove or the shovel or just popped out of the ground of its own volition as soon as I stood back to kick the slit closed.

When it’s raining like this and you’re out on a cut block, you need to keep moving, keep working, and do your best to stay warm. If you stop moving, you freeze, and the weather wins. More importantly, you stop making money. Tree-planting is all about the money, baby. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. Some people talk about how it’s all about saving the planet or communing with nature. That’s bullshit. The only sane reason to be out there in the mud and the rain and the shit is the money. And, really, you make fuck-all money. After buying your gear and the camp fees and the unavoidable weed tax, no matter how good you are, you don’t really bring home a lot of cash at the end of the season.

So why am I out here, then? If I don’t care about the planet and I’m not making any money? I’m out here because of an evil harlot named Janet Lane Pearson and because I don’t fit in anywhere else. A tree-planting camp is the best place on the planet to hide from the rest of the world and be as crazy as you need to be. And lately, ever since Janet Lane Pearson threw my heart in the wood chipper, I’d been feeling the need to be pretty crazy from time to time.

The weather wasn’t helping with the crazy urges. I was really starting to believe there was something diabolical about the way the goo wouldn’t let go of my shovel.

“Delroy,” I said, “Do you think this block is possessed by evil forces?”

Delroy was my planting partner. There were days when I hated him with a terrible passion. However, society demands we hide such emotions from our fellow man, particularly when we’re forced to work alongside that fellow man for 10 hours a day.

Delroy muttered something, or did he just fart? I couldn’t tell. Either way, I was ready to submit to the evil forces and slam him with my shovel. It would be wrong, but it would feel so good. Delroy, of course, was unaware — unaware his words slushed when he spoke; unaware the smokes he rolled were always bent; unaware he mumbled and farted intermittently between humming songs and talking to his trees. Delroy was unaware. And it drove me nuts. In fact, Delroy’s unawareness was like the goo on my shovel; it stuck to you. The sky could fall, and today it felt as though it was, and Delroy would be unaware — unrattled, unfazed, unperturbed — that was Delroy. And today it was setting my teeth on edge.

I scraped my shovel on a stump and blew a long wad of snot from my nose in Delroy’s direction. I had perfected this technique, unable to sustain a clean hankie, or free hand, my ever-running nose simply adding to the goo at my feet. Delroy, oblivious to the mucous bullet, sighed, glanced upwards, and distractedly planted another tree. From his pocket dangled the edge of a bright yellow hankie.

Delroy always had a yellow hankie with him. And within the fluorescent folds, tenderly wrapped, carefully nurtured, genuinely hoarded, was a wedge of cheese. I knew this and it rattled me. More than the wind and rain and goo, the knowledge of this cheese impacted my brain. Janet Lane Pearson wouldn’t have noticed the cheese. She never noticed anything, especially my shredded heart but I was a noticer. I had discovered Delroy’s cheese pet, and it made me feel like I was wearing wool in a sauna. Cheese and why?

Delroy stopped. This was another thing that bugged me about Delroy. He was always stopping. If you want to make money planting trees, you must never stop. Whenever Delroy stopped, I just planted around him. This tended to create cancerous bulges in our line. Fortunately, Delroy was obsessive about following the line. He’d never be a pounder, our Delroy, but he was damn meticulous with the trees he did plant.

“I don’t think blocks can be possessed,” he said. “Yes, they can be inherently evil. But that comes from within the block themselves. It’s not a manifestation of some otherworldly spirit. The land can be good or it can be evil, but it always has its own identity.”

At least, I think that’s what he said. There was a lot of mumbling in this speech and it trailed off into a bit of humming as he picked up the line again and planted another tree.

“Bullshit!” I said. “The land is innocent until the damn pixies get to it.” I took a step forward at this point and my boot stayed trapped in the goo. I stumbled sock-first into a mud-filled trench and fell over. “SEE! Frigging evil pixies!”

Delroy finished planting his tree. He jammed his shovel in a rotten log, walked over to my boot, and pulled it out of the muck. I’d lost my sock in the meantime and it took me a bit of groping through the goo to find it.

“Maybe it’s your attitude,” he said. “Whether it’s the land itself or the mythical pixies or whatever, maybe you’d encounter less evil if you were just a bit more relaxed about everything.”

He handed me my boot. I took it with the hand holding the resurrected sock, then sat down heavily on a stump. I wrung out the sock and put it on, then I dumped out the water and mud and sticks that had accumulated in the boot and pulled that on.

Maybe Delroy was right. Maybe I did need to relax. Maybe I was letting things get to me a little bit too much. But, on the other hand, the dude kept a lump of cheese in his pocket.

Maybe I needed a lump of cheese to keep in my pocket. Maybe, in a way, Janet Lane Pearson had been my lump of cheese. She was soft and squidgy like cheese. And tasty like cheese. She even had a not-unpleasant cheesy odor. She was also about as smart as a lump of cheese. My friend Leonard argued being smart like cheese trumped the tasty and squidgy aspects of Janet Lane Pearson.

“Stu,” he said to me. “Most women are squidgy, at least in bits. And they all pretty much smell the same. That’s why perfume was invented.”

We’d had a few beers at that point and I’d been spending a fair amount of the evening weeping. So much so my beer was starting to taste kind of salty. Leonard continued.

“The thing is, though, most women aren’t nearly as butt-cheese stupid as your old friend Janet. Personally, I think you’re damn lucky she dumped you. You get to retain the moral high ground and you rid yourself of a woman who could be outwitted by a dairy product.”

Actually, I’m not entirely sure Leonard made any of the cheese references at the time, but the sentiment is accurate.

Delroy was planting again. And I was still sitting on the stump. This was not the correct dynamic. Besides, I was starting to freeze my ass off. I needed to get moving. I tipped forward off the stump to get the weight of my trees over my knees and stood up. In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I hate weather, rain in particular. Janet Lane Pearson loved the rain. She thought it was romantic. Leonard was right. The woman was about as smart as a wheel of cheese.

I started planting again, stretching my spacing a bit to catch up with Delroy. The clouds were starting to break up ahead of us. The rain had stopped. Delroy didn’t seem to notice. He just kept plodding on. How could he not notice the sun? The clear blue sky?

“Look up, Delroy!” I silently urged him.

Why won’t he look up? He stopped for a moment. I thought for sure he’d look up then, but, no. He just ran his fingers over his cheese pocket, then started planting again.

Yes, maybe what I needed to get me out of this funk was a lump of cheese. And I knew just where to get one. I would steal Delroy’s cheese pet. He’d be guaranteed to notice that.

I stared gratefully, adoringly up at the sun as the plan of cheese-snatching began to take root in my fertile and very damp brain. I peered out over my line as the figure of Delroy disappeared behind the rise. I could still hear his rhythmic scrape and plunge, grunt, and sniff.

I watched warm steam lift off my chest, drift past my eyebrows, and into the waning mist. Above Delroy’s silhouette, the fog and the sunlight created an eerie halo. His pocket seemed to glow — a sign from God. I suddenly realized the cheese had to go. I needed to do something. I needed to change something. And getting rid of the cheese would be that change. I don’t know why it irritated me as much as it did. I just knew, of all the things wrong with my life, the wrongest was Delroy’s cheese. It had to go.

I would need help; that much was certain. I would need accomplices. But, surely, there must be others in the camp as desperate as I was to break out of the mundanity of the mud and the trees and the rain.

I was suddenly planting well. I’m always at my planting best when a scheme presents a meal for my brain to chew on. And when the sun came out in encouragement, I kicked into high gear. Spot, scrape, plant, and step. A delectable plan. Spot, scrape, plant, and step. Would it require costumes? Gloves? The cooks may have gloves. Would it require secret midnight meetings in some she-planter’s tent? All the better! Mental note, include a female. Ah! My brain was working now! Plant and plant and plant. Maybe include only females — what better way to bond with the better half of the crew? Heheheh! I was cookin’ now! I passed Delroy and continued spot planting along the treeline. Yes, The plan thus far was sound — meet girls and steal cheese. It all made perfect sense. I had a purpose now.

The next chapter…

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