SERIAL FICTION

Delroy and the Cheese — Part Seven

Details are hammered out — soup is served

This is the seventh 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.

Our plan was pretty simple. First, we needed to make sure I had an alibi. It was obvious I would be a prime suspect. When a wife is murdered, nine times out of ten the husband did it. Following the same logic, we figured that whenever a block of cheese is stolen, suspicion would naturally fall on the victim’s planting partner.

We thought it would make things easier if we tried to get the cheese when it wasn’t actually on Delroy’s person. None of us had much experience at thievery and my earlier attempt to just grab it out of his pocket had failed miserably.

We also decided we shouldn’t just steal the cheese. We should replace it with something. This would give us a chance of the theft going undetected for longer and, in Andrea’s mind, it was somehow less immoral. We considered a number of things to swap it with: peat moss, cardboard, tampons, and a potato carved into the shape of Delroy’s cheese. In the end, though, Andrea had the obvious answer.

“Cheddar!”

“You want to swap Delroy’s cheese for another piece of cheese?” I asked.

“It’s perfect,” said Andrea. “It has roughly the same density, the same texture. We can carve it to the same size. And it will still be cheese so we won’t even really be stealing from him. Financially, he won’t be out of pocket, so to speak.”

Unsurprisingly, Susan thought the idea was hilarious. The plan was agreed. We would swap Delroy’s cheese with a similar-sized block of cheddar liberated from the lunch table, and we would do it while both Delroy and I were in the shower. It was one of the few places we could be sure he wouldn’t have the cheese on him. No one likes a soggy pecorino after all.

The showering setup in most camps is pretty basic. Our showers were in a separate tent ironically called the dry shack. This was because the main area of the tent was for drying clothes. There was a simple wood-fired stove to aid this process. Depending on how fecund the atmosphere was, it would have more or less people hanging around it in the evening. A tarp separated the drying area from the changing area, and another tarp separated this from the actual showering area. The shower facilities themselves consisted of three evenly spaced taps about six feet above the ground.

The showers were communal. Some people were a bit shy and tried to time things so they had the shower to themselves. But most of the time, guys showered with other guys, and girls showered with other girls. This wasn’t an absolute rule, though. Occasionally, there was some mixing of the sexes. Sometimes a couple would shower together (although usually not in an intimate way), and sometimes a female planter, tired of waiting for another woman to arrive so they could take over the shower from the boys, would just go and shower with whoever was in there. This was unusual, but not unheard of.

It was not cool, however, for a random guy to jump into the shower with a couple of girls. It was also not cool to take someone joining you in the shower as some type of sexual advance. You had to be cool about it. And do your best not to get distracted or pervy.

Despite how filthy tree planting tends to be, not everyone showered every day. It took energy, which was often in short supply at the end of the day. And if it was cold and there wasn’t already a fire going in the stove, it was tempting, no matter how filthy you were, to just strip off your clothes, dive into your tent and hunker down inside your sleeping bag until morning came.

Delroy, however, was a reasonably fastidious guy and showered at least every couple of nights. I just had to keep an eye out and make sure I joined him when he did.

Sure enough, a couple of nights later, we had our chance.

After we walked back into camp that night, Delroy and I split up. I watched as he dropped his bags outside his tent, grabbed some clothes from his tent, and headed for the dry shack. I ran to the cook shack to tell Susan and Andrea. They were in the soup line. The cooks always served soup and a salad before the main course. Usually, they made vegan and non-vegan versions of both. Susan and Andrea were about five people from getting their soup. I joined them in the line.

“It’s on,” I gave them my best conspiratorial wink.

“What’s on?” Andrea.

“The caper!” I said. “The cheese is headed for the shower.”

“The chief is headed for the shower?”

“Not the chief! The cheese! You know — Delroy’s cheese.”

“Oh right,” said Andrea. “That cheese.”

“Cool!” said Susan.

“We’ll be right there,” said Andrea.

They both just stood there, waiting their turn. “Come on,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it now. Let’s go.”

“Once we get our soup,” said Andrea. “I’m starving and they always run out of the vegan version. You go. We’ll come as soon as we’ve had something to eat.”

“Yeah! Soup, then crime!” said Susan.

“Besides,” said Andrea. “We need to give Delroy time to get into the shower. It’s probably better if we’re not lurking around when you guys are getting changed. If you want to join him, you should probably get going though.”

Andrea was right. The whole point of this was to create an alibi for me. And I was sympathetic to the need for calories. You burned a lot of calories planting trees and for a caper like this, you needed to have your wits about you.

I left the girls to their soup and headed for the dry shack to check on Delroy.

Next chapter…

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A tree-planting poem based on a true story.