serial fiction
Delroy and the Cheese — Part Six
A caper is proposed
This is the sixth 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.
That night, during our book club session at Susan and Andrea’s tent, the topic of the cheese came up again. Susan had been doing the narrating. She’d paused as her throat was getting dry. It was Andrea’s turn to read, but right then she was in the middle of rolling a smoke. Susan tossed the book inside her tent, fished out her water bottle, and took a drink. Our readings had frequent pauses. And our discussions didn’t focus solely on the book. Tangents were plentiful.
Susan offered her water bottle to me, but I declined. Andrea rolled two smokes. One she handed to Susan and one she kept for herself. Almost everyone in the camp smoked. It baffled me. I could understand smoking dope, but smoking tobacco just didn’t seem to make sense from a risk and reward point of view. If you’re going to do something that is going to give you cancer, shouldn’t it at least make you feel good?
Andrea rearranged herself so she was sitting cross-legged on the ground against the log behind her and lit up. She was wearing a dark red hoodie with “Sunshine Village” written on the front, and blue cotton tights.
“How long has Delroy had that cheese?” she asked.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But I know he brought it from the city with him, so it’s got to be, what — at least five weeks old?”
“And has it always been the same size? Or was it bigger?”
“I don’t think he’s eaten any of it if that’s what you’re getting at. That’s part of the weirdness of it. I can understand the desire for a bit of culinary strange, but the concept of food as a good luck charm is foreign to me.”
“I think it’s singular,” said Susan.
“I think it’s weird,” I said. “It’s obsessive. It has to be stopped.” I scooted closer to them and gestured they should lean forward. “We need to take it away from him for his own good,” I said. “We need to steal it.”
“You’re not serious,” said Andrea.
“Absolutely I’m serious! Delroy needs to come back to the real world. He lives in this bubble of Italian cheese and yellow handkerchiefs. We need to bring him back to reality.
“Besides,” I continued. “It’s dangerous. Cheese attracts bears. That’s probably why that bear tried to kill us today.”
“It tried to kill you?” asked Andrea. “I thought it was a couple of hundred meters away. Did it have a sniper rifle or something?”
“It was sneaking up on us. Stalking us. Stalking Delroy’s cheese. I’m sure of it. If we hadn’t scared it off, who knows what would have happened.”
Andrea and Susan looked at each other, then back at me. They were unconvinced. I was worried they thought I was the crazy one, not Delroy.
I tried another tack. “Ok,” I said, “Whether it’s for good reasons or bad, haven’t you ever wanted to be part of a grand criminal caper? Be an outlaw? A cat burglar? Steal jewels from a hotel room on the French Riviera? Crack a safe in the middle of the night? Think of the danger! Think of the glamour!”
Andrea nodded. “Oh! I get it now!” she said. “You don’t really want to help Delroy. You’re just bored. You want to take away something he loves because your own life is petty and small.”
“Well, yeah — basically. I’m stuck in a camp in the middle of nowhere! I’m going out of my mind! I need to do something other than just slam trees into the ground and listen to you two read Ulysses.”
“You don’t like story time?” asked Susan, pouting.
“I love storytime! Storytime is ace!” I said. “But I need more. Don’t you want more? Don’t you want to do something you’ll remember for the rest of your lives?”
The girls looked at each other again. I could tell I’d planted the seed of something in their heads. I wasn’t sure what it was. Doubt? Evil? Boredom? Whatever it was, it seemed to work.
“Ok, fine. I’m in,” said Andrea. “I could do with a bit of excitement, and the French Riviera is just too far away to be practical.”
Susan let out one of her sky-shattering laughs. “You people are evil!” She said. “But, what the hell! Yeah, let’s steal his cheese.”
Next Chapter…
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Another tree-planting tale, only this one is true.