Wilderness Tips Read Online Free

puffs.
    Something hits Donny in the side of the head. It’s Ritchie’s wet underpants, squashed into a ball. Donny throws them back and soon there’s an underpants war. Monty refuses to join in, so he becomes the common target. “Sod off!” he yells.
    “Cut it out, you pinheads,” Darce says. But he isn’t really paying attention: he’s seen something else, a flash of blue uniform, up among the trees. The waitresses aren’t supposed to be over here on this side of the island. They’re supposed to be on their own dock, having their afternoon break.
    Darce is up among the trees now, one arm braced against a trunk. A conversation is going on; there are murmurs. Donny knows it’s Ronette, he can tell by the shape, by the colour of the hair. And here he is, with his washboard ribs exposed, his hairless chest, throwing underpants around like a kid. He’s disgusted with himself.
    Monty, outnumbered but not wanting to admit defeat, says he needs to take a crap and disappears along the path to the outhouse.By now Darce is nowhere in sight. Donny captures Monty’s laundry, which is already finished and wrung out and spread neatly on the hot rock to dry. He starts tossing it up into a jack pine, piece by piece. The others, delighted, help him. By the time Monty gets back, the tree is festooned with Monty’s underpants and the other boys are innocently rinsing.
    They’re on one of the pink granite islands, the four of them: Joanne and Ronette, Perry and Darce. It’s a double date. The two canoes have been pulled half out of the water and roped to the obligatory jack pines, the fire has done its main burning and is dying down to coals. The western sky is still peach-toned and luminous, the soft ripe juicy moon is rising, the evening air is warm and sweet, the waves wash gently against the rocks. It’s the Summer Issue, thinks Joanne.
Lazy Daze. Tanning Tips. Shipboard Romance
.
    Joanne is toasting a marshmallow. She has a special way of doing it: she holds it close to the coals but not so close that it catches fire, just close enough so that it swells up like a pillow and browns gently. Then she pulls off the toasted skin and eats it, and toasts the white inside part the same way, peeling it down to the core. She licks marshmallow goo off her fingers and stares pensively into the shifting red glow of the coal bed. All of this is a way of ignoring or pretending to ignore what is really going on.
    There ought to be a tear drop, painted and static, on her cheek. There ought to be a caption:
Heartbreak
. On the spread-out groundsheet right behind her, his knee touching her back, is Perry, cheesed off with her because she won’t neck with him. Off behind the rocks, out of the dim circle of firelight, are Ronette and Darce. It’s the third week in July and by now they’re a couple, everyone knows it. In the rec hall she wears his sweatshirt with the St. Jude’s crest; she smiles more these days, and even laughs when the other girls tease her about him. During this teasing Hilary does not join in. Ronette’sface seems rounder, healthier, its angles smoothed out as if by a hand. She is less watchful, less diffident. She ought to have a caption too, thinks Joanne.
Was I Too Easy?
    There are rustlings from the darkness, small murmurings, breathing noises. It’s like a movie theatre on Saturday night. Group grope.
The young in one another’s arms
. Possibly, thinks Joanne, they will disturb a rattlesnake.
    Perry puts a hand, tentatively, on her shoulder. “Want me to toast you a marshmallow?” she says to him politely. The frosty freeze. Perry is no consolation prize. He merely irritates her, with his peeling sun-burnt skin and begging spaniel’s eyes. Her so-called real boyfriend is no help either, whizzing on his train tracks back and forth across the prairies, writing his by-now infrequent inky letters, the image of his face all but obliterated, as if it’s been soaked in water.
    Nor is it Darce she wants, not really.