‘The Highway: Diner’ (sic) has a relatively short entry in Shitholes which makes me feel a little more at ease stopping inside. The book even mentions that the shakes are good so I order two and forgo any other sort of dinner in case that’s code for something dire. As far as I can tell, the restaurant is the only building for several miles along the highway, surrounded by dry looking fields behind and a sprawling, trucker-friendly parking lot out front. My own truck looks pretty small out there and I look pretty small in my booth, surrounded by the relatively girthy customers who pay me no mind.
“What’s with the statue out back?” I ask the waitress when she comes around with the second shake.
“The owner thinks it brings people in here.”
“It brought me in here,” I tell her, “How does the owner feel about people walking out for a closer look?”
“I don’t think it would be a problem,” she says and I ask for the bill.
She’s got a tattoo just above the elbow, something that the uniform is probably supposed to be hiding. I wonder what else she hides and I scrape my thumb across the prongs of my fork and squeeze my eyes shut.
I open my eyes.
Most people think that clean and unkempt are mutually exclusive but there are places in the Midwest that would prove them wrong. By all accounts my table is clean, for instance, but the laminate on the corners has worn away where bigger, greasier people than me have hoisted themselves into a standing position. The booths are cracked and shining, the toilet seats white and skewed. The second shake is too much, I only finish half before slipping a guilty tip under the cold, wet base of the cup.
The sun is setting on the field behind the diner, making a massive silhouette of the statue there and piercing it in several places. There doesn’t seem to be a clear path so I take off through the brittle weeds, careful to avoid little cacti that grow in lumps around these parts. The field is abuzz with insects, invisible except for the occasional grasshopper that alights at my stomping. When I look backward to see if anybody has noticed my pilgrimage I find the diner strangely distant and the statue nowhere nearer. Even the sun has frozen in the sky.
I walk for another half hour, seeming to make no progress. The statue, in the crude shape of a man, is much larger than I expected and much further away. My mouth is dry and I cough when something flies into my mouth. I spit out a fly and move on.
I’m walking with my head down when, after another half hour, I see a figure on my right. This is another statue, the same shape as the larger one but only four feet tall. It’s welded rebar for the most part, rusted except for two gleaming white marbles for eyes. The big, shooter kind. This little guy looks to be reaching out to the big one, hand upturned and pleading. I’m not sure how I could have missed this from the road but when I look back the diner is just a dot on the horizon. The sun has still not set and I’m alone out here. I press the marble eyes with my finger and they turn freely in their sockets. I find pupils on the other side and arrange them so he’s cross-eyed.
There are others on the way, all pleading to the statue in the middle, each milky-eyed and short, and they grow numerous and crowded. I stop again, having almost bumped in to one to avoid another and when I look back it might as well be me they’re pleading to. Looking back at something like that makes a guy feel like he can do a little more for people. Makes a guy feel like a god.
By the time the shadow of the center statue falls over me I’m having to push my way through the pleading rebar men below. The titan at the center is difficult to conceive up close. The diner had disappeared entirely on the horizon, the head of the thing into the sky. Sunlight pricks through the giant, making it difficult to outline. In its shadow I see that this, too, is made of rebar; vast, twisting vines of rusted iron reaching into the atmosphere. Suddenly the sun is low and the shadow of the thing stretches inconceivably backwards.
The metal of the back heel has been pried open, just enough for a person to fit through. The particular patterns of the metal make it difficult to examine closely, but I see there is something like stairs inside and because darkness is quickly falling on the field I climb in. The gaps in the metal are enough to light my way but hardly enough for a view. I climb for an hour before the dusk is too thick for me to continue without the light of my phone. Airstreams previously foreign to me whistle through the iron coils and chill the handholds I grasp for. It would be a waste to make it this far and then turn back. Another 45 minutes up and I come to an exit.
It’s windy and cold outside and even though the statue’s shoulder is broad and stable I cling to the bars under me and crawl forward, afraid a renegade gust will catch my jacket and send me over the edge. The hand is ahead but it seems to hover distantly in the air, just as the statue had on the ground. When I reach the figure’s elbow I stop to take it in and see that even this thing, this metal giant, wears the demeanor of a pleading man. Its mouth is open and slack, it’s eyes, the same white marble, wide.
Tucked into the thing’s arm, it’s easy to imagine that the deep void of space and its stars are watching eyes, and that the glowing orbs below in the field, clustered around the base of the statue, are as massive and distant as foreign suns. I open Shitholes and read, again, the short entry for the diner and its attraction:
“The roadside art installation behind the diner proper keeps a weary traveler from dwelling on the small portions served within, posing a much wider, much more harrowing question to dwell upon. Do try the shakes.”
-traveler
