SERIAL FICTION

Delroy and the Cheese — Part Eight

Cleanliness, nudity and cheese

This is the eighth chapter of an 18 chapter series about life in a Canadian tree-planting camp. If you’re new, you may want to start at the beginning or go to the complete list of Delroy and the Cheese chapters.

I pulled open the flap of the dry shack and ducked inside. A couple of guys were already in the shower. Delroy was sitting on an equipment crate near the wood stove.

I sat down next to him. “Showering?”

“Yep.”

“Me too. You okay if we go in together?”

“Sure. No problem.”

A few minutes later, once the other guys were finished, Delroy and I went into the shower area and started to get undressed. I heard the girls come into the tent. One of them tripped over something and they both stifled a giggle. Susan’s giggle was, as always, pretty much unstifled.

I didn’t want Delroy to realise they were there so I started talking loudly to cover up the noise.

“Man! What a brutal day. I’m really looking forward to washing some of this grime off.”

Delroy just nodded and hummed a little tune to himself. So far, so good. As I said, the man is relentlessly unaware of anything going on around him.

We were in the shower now and I was still making nervous conversation about whatever I could think of.

“The water’s not bad, don’t you think? I mean it’s never really hot, but sometime’s it’s freezing. But, maybe, you know, it’s better when it’s freezing right from the get go? I hate it when the propane runs out when you’re in the middle of a shower. You’re all soaped up and toasty and then, Bam! Ice Ice Baby! It’s not worth waiting for someone to change the tank. You’ll just freeze anyway, so you just have to rinse off as best you can and be done with it. It’s better if you just go in knowing it’s going to be cold. Don’t you think?”

Delroy ignored me. He continued to hum and scrub himself. By now I could hear the girls in changing area and see their silhouettes against the tarp.

“What’s even worse is when the pump runs out of gas. That happened to me once when it was pretty late. I was all soaped up at the time. I called for help but nobody was there. Finally, I just threw on a pair of boots, grabbed a towel, and scooted down to the creek. I filled up the pump myself while the mosquitos feasted on my soapy ass.”

There was another Susan-sized giggle which I assume meant they had found the cheese. In fact, I know that’s what it meant because suddenly Delroy stopped humming.

“Do you smell that?” he asked.

“Smell what?”

“Smells like cheese.”

He turned towards the changing area.

The silhouettes on the tarp immediately stopped moving.

“I don’t smell anything,” I said, panic making my voice a little shriller than normal.

I had to stop him from catching the girls in the act. I grabbed his arm and pointed behind him.

“Hey! What’s that on your back?”

Delroy turned to try and look over his shoulder at his back.

“What is it?”

He turned in a bit of a circle. I held on to his arm and turned with him, moving him away from the edge of the tarp where the girls were.

“I think it’s an insect bite or something. It’s like a big red lump. Can’t you feel it?”

“No, nothing.” He tried to reach behind him with the arm I wasn’t holding. “I can’t feel anything.” There was another noise from the other side of the tarp. Delroy’s attention turned back to the changing area. “Stu, I think someone’s going through our stuff.”

“That’s crazy. Why would they care about our stuff? There’s no one back there.” Although now it plainly sounded like there was. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on but the girls were up to something. There were rustling sounds and one of them stumbled against the tarp. Delroy looked at me as if I was a crazy person and then stared pointedly at my hand which was still holding his arm. I let go. “It’s probably just someone else getting changed,” I said.

Delroy walked towards the edge of the tarp. I went with him, step after step, trying to come up with some excuse to keep him in the shower area when Andrea popped out right in front of us — naked.

Wow! So naked! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more naked person. I knew she was doing this to distract Delroy but it was like my brain had just been whacked with the horny stick. My eyes felt like they might explode.

“Oh Hi!” she said. “Sorry to butt in like this. I just couldn’t wait another minute. I was feeling all sticky.”

It worked. Delroy, embarrassed, stopped in his tracks and turned around so he was no longer facing her.

As I mentioned earlier, the etiquette in this type of situation is just to be cool about it, pretend everything is normal, and overlook the fact that you are now part of a group of naked people of mixed genders. The tricky part is when you find the naked person attractive. Sometimes this is difficult — particularly if you are an adult male in his 20s, particularly if you are completely naked yourself, particularly if the person you are attracted to is intentionally trying to be as distracting as possible in an attempt to make some other naked guy forget about the fact that someone is stealing his cheese.

Looking at the two of us, Delroy and I, it was obvious which of us was doing a better job of pretending this was normal. It wasn’t me.

I moved to use Delroy as a shield to hide my condition from Andrea. I was now directly facing him and he had a clear view of my very physical reaction to her nakedness. If he wasn’t embarrassed before, he was definitely embarrassed now.

“Dude!” he whispered, trying not to look below my belt line. “You need to calm down!”

If Andrea noticed anything (which I’m sure she did), she was doing a good job of hiding it.

“You boys don’t mind if I just step under the water for a second, do you?”

It was close quarters in the shower and she put a hand on each of our shoulders as she sidled past us to get under the shower nozzle.

This did not help my situation, but I knew we had to keep Delroy in the shower as long as we could.

“Not at all,” I said, nervously. “Just let us rinse off and we’ll be out of your hair.”

I pushed Delroy toward one of the other shower taps.

Delroy was starting to shake a little bit.

“I don’t need to rinse! I’m clean!” he said. “Really! I’m so very very clean.”

There was a little dance as Delroy tried to find a way to the changing area which didn’t involve touching either of us, and Andrea and I tried to block his progress as much as possible while pretending we were just showering normally. This was particularly complicated for me as I was desperately trying to keep my front facing away from Andrea while trying to get in Delroy’s way while trying to catch as many sneaky glimpses of Andrea as I could while trying to convince my body to ignore what I was looking at and file it away for later study.

In my defense, I’d like to point out that I had been in the bush for five weeks and the last naked woman I’d seen was Janet Lane Pearson and that had not been under very good circumstances — the view being largely blocked at the time by the buttocks of my erstwhile good friend, Robert Sinjin Bartholomew.

Delroy’s own efforts were complicated by the fact that he was particularly keen to keep away from the front of my body and all of Andrea’s. Considering that I was facing away from Andrea, this didn’t leave him much room to maneuver. Eventually, though, he did manage it and stumbled past the tarp into the changing area. Andrea and I had stalled him enough. Susan was gone. We could only hope she’d managed to switch the cheese.

Next chapter…

Want to make sure you don’t miss the next chapter? Subscribe to get an email whenever I publish anything new.

This one isn’t about tree planting, but it does contain humor and nudity.