So Long, Chester Wheeler(25)

“I’ll go out and buy two bumper stickers,” Anna said, “and meet you at your house.”

“Wait. Where do you buy bumper stickers?”

“I don’t know. I’ll look it up on my phone.”

“What are you going to buy?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Something fairly neutral,” I said.

“You sure you don’t want to take this opportunity to piss him off?”

“Positive.”

“Okay,” she said. “Trust me. I’ll handle it.”

She jumped into her car and started it up, and Marshall arrived with a roll of silver duct tape and taped over the offending stickers.

“Ever drive one of these?” he asked when he’d straightened up.

“No, never.”

“Ever drive anything bigger than a car?”

“No.”

“Then you better let me show you a couple things before you drive it off the lot.”



I sat behind the wheel, and Marshall sat in the passenger seat, and I eased the huge boat toward an orange traffic safety cone he’d set up in the gravelly dirt.

“See, you can’t turn when you think you can,” he said. “You have to go way past that cone. Figure the cone is the curb and you’re making a right turn. Pull left just a little. Because in a real traffic situation you won’t have room to go left very much. Don’t forget this thing is wide. Now, see how there’s an inset mirror in the bottom of the right side mirror? That’ll show you your curb. Or your cone in this case. Go farther past it than you think should be necessary, and then make your turn.”

I eased forward again, watching the cone in the mirror as the land boat slid by it. I kept going. And going. And going. And then I swung the huge steering wheel right to go around it . . . and promptly hit it and knocked it over.

I stopped the monster and sat for a minute with my head in my hands.

“It just takes some practice,” he said.

“It’s more than that, though,” I said through my fingers. “I thought I’d imagined every way this trip could be a nightmare. And now it turns out there was this whole other way I’d never even thought of. I have to drive a giant freaking Winnebago.”

“It’s mostly highway driving,” he said. “Once you get it out on the highway it’s a different deal. You just keep it in your lane and that’s it. Try it again.”

He jumped out and set up the cone, and I swung a wide arc around his parking lot and approached it again. This time I went even farther past the cone. Pulled even farther left. I made my turn . . . and knocked it over again.

Marshall opened the passenger door.

“One more time,” he said. “You’ll get it this time.”

I took another quick tour of his lot and made another right turn around the cone, seriously exaggerating my tactics. It worked, though. I left the cone standing.

He came up to the passenger window and I powered it down.

“In a real-world situation,” he said, “you’d never have that much room to swing left. But no worries. Go ahead and take it home. Nice and slow. People’ll honk at you, but just let ’em. Just ignore it. By the time you get back you’ll halfway have the hang of the thing.”

I pulled out into the road, a knot in my gut the size of which nothing and no one but Chester Wheeler had ever caused.



Anna was waiting for me in front of the house. I assumed that meant she hadn’t yet bothered to go bumper sticker shopping.

I pulled up to the curb and sighed out the most immense boatload of tension.

I turned off the engine, pulled on the parking brake, and stepped out.

“Jeez, Lewis,” she said. “What could possibly have taken you so long?”

I stood in the street, staring at her, feeling the muscles in my thighs tremble—though whether their problem was physical strain or stress to my psyche remained unclear.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked her. “Have you ever tried to drive one of these things?”

“No. Why? Was it hard?”

“It was the most frightening time I’ve ever spent on a road.”

“Well, you made it,” she said. “Here.”

And she handed me a small, flat paper bag.

“Don’t tell me you actually had time to buy bumper stickers,” I said.

“Wow. You really don’t know how long you were gone.”

I reached into the bag and pulled one out without comment. It was a “coexist” sticker. Most people have seen them, I think. They have all these religious symbols doing double duty as letters.

I narrowed my eyes at her. I opened my mouth to complain about what she was letting me in for. Then I closed my mouth and decided I should look at the other one first.

I pulled it out of the bag and burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. It might have been a release of tension. I’m not sure.

It said, BETTER A BLEEDING HEART THAN NO HEART AT ALL.

I looked up at Anna again.

“You call these fairly neutral?”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You must want to mess with him a little.”

“You don’t get it,” I said. “You don’t know how he gets when you mess with him. You’ll be home where you can’t hear it. I’m the one who’ll catch it.”