Wheelock

Short Story by Doug Hawley

I’d known Stan from work for about a month when he asked me, “Want to go on an adventure this weekend?” I had just moved to Oregon from the East Coast and wanted to know more about the place, so I agreed even though I didn’t know Stan well. We’d just had drinks after work a couple of times. He responded, “Great. I think you’ll love Wheelock.”

We took off from Eugene Saturday night in Stan’s Jeep Wrangler and drove East on 126. After about an hour, we turned right onto a dirt road and drove for another hour before stopping in a flat area with a lot of other cars. We went into a large tent with a brightly lit interior, which was dark on the outside. The inside was like a circus. There were acrobats on a wire, jugglers, singers, and dancers. It had carnival rides like a tilt-a-wheel and a small rollercoaster. Stan caught me looking around and said, “Those are fun, but the real thrill is the tunnel of love,” to which he pointed. “Try that.”

“By myself?”

“Trust me, you’ll love it.”

This was not the usual tunnel of love. Instead of boats in a stream, it had carts on tracks. I got in the cart, and as it got into the lit tunnel, I was startled to see an attractive redheaded woman in the seat ahead of me. Could I have missed her in the darkness at the beginning of the ride? She joined me on my bench seat but then asked me, “This is pretty tight, mind if I sit on your lap?” I had not had opportunities for romance since I started my new job, so I told her, please do. I’m not a gentleman, but I won’t go into detail about our journey, but I will say she was quite aggressive. At the end of the ride, she said, “Maybe you could visit Wheelock next Saturday.”

There was nothing out of the ordinary with the other rides; so after trying them, I found a few places where people were giving speeches. One of them was talking about a well-known singer who he claimed had dated him for a month before he broke up with her. He said he was the only one she had never written a song about. A woman went on about an interracial affair she had with a famous actress before the actress committed suicide. The physicist explained particle entanglement so a layman such as I could understand it.

Sometime after midnight, the tent was taken down, sleeping bags were deployed, and we slept under the stars.

The trip back to Eugene was uneventful. We didn’t talk much; I was absorbed in processing what had happened. Looking back, the whole experience seemed like a dream.

On Monday, I asked Stan when we could go back to Wheelock. He looked puzzled and said, “There’s no such place in Oregon. We went out into the country to look at the stars. Hope you enjoyed it.”

What happened on Saturday? I don’t know, but I’m going back next Saturday by myself to see if I can find Wheelock.