“The Fairy Fern Refuge Area is hidden behind a labyrinth of poorly placed signs and poorly worded directions. Even seasoned travelers will find themselves doubting on the long hike to the refuge, wondering whether they’ve wandered through the Fairy Ferns without realizing, only to conclude eventually that the Fairy Fern infestation ground would be very difficult to mistake.”

The author of Shitholes, be it me or someone else, has not seen fit to write their own directions or draw their own map to the Fairy Fern Refuge Area. A road sign mentions, as an afterthought, that the trailhead can be found ten miles ahead but the road signs seem to forget about it afterward and I spend an hour and a half roving the same stretch of forested highway until a small pull-off catches my eye. There’s a barbwire fence I hop, which worries me, but a decayed wooden sign in the dirt a short ways ahead shares several letters with the place I’m trying to find. Past that I’m left to follow a path which seems surprisingly viable considering the hoops I’ve jumped through to find it.

I walk a mile and swing left on a fork before I hear the low sounds of voices ahead and smell a good deal of smoke. Shortly I emerge into a small clearing in which several kids, maybe just out of high school, have built a little fire and around which they are drinking beer and shooting the shit. I haven’t been particularly quiet but they haven’t taken many precautions in terms of keeping an ear out and because I’ve been sleeping in the truck these past few days and haven’t slept all that well I wonder if my appearance doesn’t startle them some.

“Hey guys,” I say, offering a casual half-wave, “Is this the Fairy Fern Refuge Area?”

A look passes between them, a look that I don’t immediately understand. Could be relief that they’re not getting busted, could be suspicion, suspicion that I might still be out to murder them or to take their weed.

“This is just a place,” one says, “It doesn’t have a name.”

“Spooky,” I joke and I try to smile but they all just keep staring.

Fuck, I’ve gotten old. They don’t think I’m some sinister grifter at all, they think I’m a middle-aged plant enthusiast. It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m walking around the woods looking for a fern refuge and I’m clutching Shitholes in my hand like it’s a bible. There’s a banana and a bag of granola in my backpack because I’ve been getting peckish on excursions like these. And I used to be one of these guys, these kids that hang out in the woods. Fuck me, this is embarrassing.

“I think I took a wrong turn back a little way,” I tell them and stalk off, not unaware of suppressed laughter.

The right-at-the-fork is a lot less easy going than the left, a way overrun with nettles and segmented by fallen trees. Clumps of moss come off in my hands as I scramble over the underbrush and I maneuver awkwardly over the insect colonies I expose there. The whole way I’m thinking of those kids and their smug-sounding laughter and I’m realizing that no matter how this pans out those kids are going to have a better day than I am. Either I find the place or I don’t and that those are my choices is just… it’s just exhausting.

There are a bunch more forks and turns in the path, a lot of roundabouts that are just long enough to trick me into going in circles. Shitholes guy, maybe me, was right about the refuge being a pain to find and he doesn’t even include a picture or a description of a fairy fern but seems to rely on the reader just knowing it when they see it which I know I probably won’t. What do I do with my time between cases that isn’t research? There’s nothing of substance to my free time, a lot of trying to sleep in the back of my pick-up. A lot of hasty eating.

After another short hike I come across a lacquered brick path, well grown over, certainly, but the sort of thing that promises a sight. It’s also when I hear a voice in the tree above me and it says:

“If I had more teeth, would you think I was more beautiful?”

There’s a man in the tree, dressed in worn jeans and a t-shirt that looks like he bought it at a gas station.

“Who says I think you’re beautiful?”

“Nobody,” he says and I see that he’s missing two teeth front and center, one above and one below, “It’s a question of relativity.”

“I’ve never dated a guy who was missing teeth.”

“Not what I asked either.”

“Then?”

“How many more teeth could I have,” he asks, “Before I was less beautiful? I’ve still got my wisdom teeth, if that matters.”

“I’m going to say five for the sake of ending this.”

“If you’re looking for the fairy ferns, you just missed them.”

For some reason this bothers me more than the teeth, even though it seems reasonable that the refuge is the only reason I would be out here. Suddenly the wind changes and I smell smoke.

“I burned them,” he says before I can ask.

I set out on the lacquered bricks at a jog but I only have to turn a corner before I see the smoking clearing ahead. A pile of fairy ferns burns freely in the center, individual fronds twisting and grasping in ways that are uncomfortably human. The earth has been gouged out, the trees nearby stripped of their bark.

“I salted the earth, too,” the guy says behind me, “I’m not superstitious, it just means things won’t grow as well now.”

“I know what salting the earth does!” I snap, “Why did you torch this place?”

“Have you seen a fairy fern?” he asks, “They’re invasive, bad for the plants around it, bad for the people who come to see them. If a plant deserves to be burned, the fairy fern does.”

“But this was a refuge.”

“Just calling a place a refuge doesn’t mean anything,” he shrugs, “If anybody wanted to protect these plants they would have put a guard out or something. If I had come through a month ago you would have walked through this field without ever realizing you missed them. I don’t think the world will suffer for their loss.”

“The…”

“You’re going to tell me that the food chain, the cycle of life is an intricately balanced system and that everything has its place but I’ll tell you that the world has been rebounding from extinctions for as long as there has been life and that sometimes, a lot of times, the blind groping of evolution on this planet produces something that’s just shit all around. You stepped on a piece of fairy fern back there, now look at the bottom of your shoe.”

There’s a frond trailing behind me like toilet paper and when I lift my foot I see that the base of the thing has worked its way up into the treads, digging into the rubber of my shoe. I pull my boot off quickly and feel pricks of pain in my foot as I do. My sock comes off, held to the inside of the shoe and bloodied. There are several small holes in my foot, each trickling blood. The fairy fern has infested the boot entirely and the leather pulls apart in my hand.

“Tell me you’re not going to throw that in the fire.”

“Of course I’m not,” I tell him, though it had crossed my mind, “You’re going to stop me?”

“Do I look like the fighting type?” he asks and I see again that he’s missing teeth, that there’s a knife at his side and dirt under his fingernails. He can’t be much older than me but he’s bigger and certainly stronger and he’s got a dirty shovel in his hands.

“Yes.”

“Well I’m tired after digging up so many plants.”

I’ve shaken most of the boot away from the fairy fern and it hangs limply now, watching the end of its species.

“How did you find this place?” I ask the man as he turns to leave.

“Read about it in a book. Watch your finger.”

The fairy fern has reached back up and wrapped a tendril around my pinky. I quickly shake it off and say nothing else as he goes. My own progress back to the truck is slow, walking with an injured, bare foot and stopping the fairy fern’s attempts to consume me. There’s a rat’s cage in the back of my truck that wasn’t there before, a rat’s cage and a few empty beer bottles. A scrap of paper, torn from another copy of Shitholes, is tucked up under my windshield wiper and it’s got a phone number scribbled in the margin. The entry is for a place called ‘The Kat Cirkus!’ and the guy’s crossed everything out and written ‘don’t bother looking for this one either.’

I cram the fairy fern into the rat cage and by the time I’m looking at it in the rearview mirror it’s already well-tangled around the bars. I’ll have to look into an aquarium.

-traveler

‘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

My skin is sticky with rain when the cool lobby air, with its smell of must and hair, squeezes in under my clothes. That smell tells me everything I need to know about the room I’ll be staying in. The floor will be carpeted and up close it will smell like detergent but in a general, distant way it will smell like cigarette smoke. The top drawer of the end table next to the bed but nearest the door will have nothing but a bible in it and the bottom drawer will stick and it’ll have saw dust in the back corners. The lights will be dim and there will be a leak somewhere, the bathroom sink, most likely, but I’d place bets on the roof in this place.

I’ve stayed in a lot of places like this, is what I’m saying, and I start thinking about taking off before the guy behind the counter meets my eye.

“Checking in?”

“You’ve got a vacancy?” I ask, hoping he’ll say no.

“Sign’s lit up outside isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Sign’s broken,” he says, “We’ve got all the rooms you need.”

“Just one then.”

There’s an ash tray in the room and a ‘no-smoking’ sign glares out from the back of the door before I cover it with my jacket and take off my shoes. The room is yellow in a lot of subtle ways but better than I expected from the look of the manager. Maybe he’s got a wife or a son that looks after the customers with more care than he does. I take off my pants too, unbutton my shirt. I lift a slat of the shades and give the wet, dejected silhouette of my truck a sympathetic stare. There’s a suitcase in the cab with most of my worldly possessions but nothing in there is worth the walk back across the parking lot.

I dump the contents of the little bag I brought with me onto the bed: a book, a flashlight, three pens, and a comb case that I’d rather not talk about. The book on the other hand, the book is why I’m telling you any of this at all. This shitty-looking paperback travel guide was handed to me by a man trying to prove he had the power of foresight and it turns out the thing was written by me at some later date, a me that lives with his wife in a small apartment in Brooklyn some years from now.

“So fuck you,” I told the guy, “If I wrote the thing then I’m the one doing all the work here,” and he told me to hang on to it because he didn’t think I was taking the situation seriously. Since looking the thing over I’ve taken the seriousness of the situation at a rate of about two and half times.

‘Autumn by the Wayside: A Guide to America’s Shitholes’

The dog-eared page about a third of the way through the book has a photo of this motel and an interview with the guy in the lobby. ‘Phil’ is the only answer he gives that isn’t ‘no’ so the rest of the entry refers to him as Phillip the Naysayer which is exactly the sort of thing I would write about someone if left to my own devices. Now that I’m being told I’ve written it already the epithet seems bitter and tacky and not at all like me.

The rain peters out around ten and so I pull my pants back on and stomp to the roadside with my copy of Autumn by the Wayside and compare really carefully the pictures and descriptions to verify everything. I notice, not without a little despair, that the lit room in the book’s illustration is the very same that I’ll be passing my night in. The caption, ‘Doors are self-locking,’ seems out of place until I check my pockets and remember my keys on the table inside.

“No,” Phil says when I ask him if he’s got a spare.

“You don’t keep a master key or something?”

“Lost it.”

“You lost your master key?”

“You lost my regular keys.”

“Seems short-sighted, Phil,” I tell him and he keeps quiet in quasi-agreement.

“Handyman’ll be in tomorrow,” he says, “Take the place next door and don’t lose my keys.”

I become my own neighbor in a room that seems a little more yellow than the last but otherwise bears a remarkable resemblance down to the placement of stains. The book says it’s worth spending the night awake to avoid being woken by the noises in the walls that perk up around one and wake you up anyway so I open the bible to the first page and wait.

I’m just getting past the ‘begats’ when I hear a noise. A minute passes and I turn a page and the noise comes round again, this time clearly in the wall behind my head, a muffled noise like a jacket sliding off a chair.

That’s my room back there, my first, theoretically empty, room. Or else, and this is truly the coldest of comforts, the noise is just coming from inside the wall. It happens again while I consider, this time not waiting for something to cover it, this time nearer the door but still firmly in or against the wall. I open the book again to see if I have anything else to say about the matter.

‘The advertised breakfast manifests in much the same way as the thing in the walls: potentially harmless if left alone but tempting and ultimately a cause for distress.”

The noise again, a fabricky sliding across the wall. I’ve got myself into a pickle with this one because it’s either actually a thing in the wall or it’s a thing in the other room with things I love like my phone and my keychains. Sitting up between heartbeats, I stretch and look over the wallpaper for cracks or likely seams but don’t see anything noteworthy. I step forward and the thing inside reacts all at once with a noise like a jacket being thrown against the wall, sends me skittering back. It shuffles back toward my bed frame and the noise disappears into the corner.

Outside I see that it’s started to rain again, big sloppy dribbles from the celestial St. Bernard. I peer through the shades of my old room, trying to align the pin-prick holes into a clear image. My glasses are in there somewhere. The shade moves a little behind the window and I try to remember if I left the bathroom window cracked or the fan on or if there had been a particularly gusty A/C unit or something but none of that sounds familiar. Ominous.

Could be I’m to blame but if something’s called ‘the thing in the walls’ you’d expect that it spends at least half its time in the wall, right? That’s the sort of parameter I feel like could grant me a little leeway in antagonizing the situation.

Back in my old room I see that the thing has taken the liberty of punching a hole in the wall or, I should say, from within the wall. An exit hole. The thing that’s not in the walls flutters under my bed when I step forward and I jump on back to the door frame, just a little annoyed that my second room may very well be unviable after this. From a distance it looks like the thing left a variety of flaky, fibrous strips on the jagged edges of plywood upon exiting, dusty like moth wings. A piece breaks off as I watch and lands close to the bed, close enough that the thing under the bed, now more aptly named, reveals about six inches of itself as it scurries briefly my direction.

This is a thing about the size and shape of a flattened shih-tzu, dry and papery, no real face to speak of. The body’s made up of something like a fan mold, emitting from the center and layered over several times. When it moves, it moves in frantic, scurrying spider walks and sounds like old newspaper being shuffled around. The thing smells like mold too, it might just be a mold of some sort. If it looks like mold and smells like mold…

It moves back under the bed, little dried bits of it breaking off the edges when they brush against the frame’s leg. I flip through the book in my hand to see if there’s anything helpful. Sometimes I miss things and sometimes I feel like the book changes in between readings.

‘The advertised breakfast…’

There’s a noise, the thing moving around again. I look up and can’t tell whether it’s still under the bed. There’s nothing nearby to throw so I take off my shoe and lob it at the bed. It lands about two feet in front and the thing scurries out over it, halting eerily on top and draping its curling, fleshy slabs over the slides. It turns once, after a second, and I wonder if it isn’t looking at me.

“Boo!” I shout and it comes closer so I run outside into the rain.

The thing from the walls sits very still, framed by the open door, looking like an angry, moldy doormat. I stand in the rain, looking back. Several minutes pass and my clothes get wet and heavy. I wipe rain from my eyes, think the thing maybe moved and second guess myself. I blink and it’s gone. Definitely gone.

My shoe looks dusty and rotten where the thing sat on it and the room’s got a smell like mushrooms but maybe I’m just making that up. The coast looks clear from the doorway but I throw in my other shoe just to make sure. The thing scurries out from under the dresser and up and into the wall again. I stuff a pillow inside and head back to the lobby.

“Phil?” I ask, because I can’t tell whether he’s sleeping in that chair, “Phil I’m afraid you’ve got something in the walls of this place.”

“Saw a rat?”

“What I saw was not a rat.”

“Something like a mop head come out of the wall?”

“Phil, if we’re talking about the same thing I think you need to budget for new mops.”

Phil grunts.

“That thing in the walls is pretty freaky, man,” I continue, “Any chance you’ll be doing something about that?”

“You find that sort of thing in old places like this,” he says, “We’re renovating next year.”

“In the short-term? It punched a hole in the wall, Phil.”

“How big of a hole?”

I think for a moment before I answer.

“Big enough for a person to crawl through. Goes into the room I was in before.”

He doesn’t seem particularly disturbed by this.

“Do you have any fondness for the thing? If you hear some banging around later will you come running or is it cool that I use an amount of lethal force?”

“Thing’s got no love from me.”

“Got anything around here with some heft?”

Phil looks tired and annoyed.

“I’m the sort of guy that writes reviews, Phil, and you lending me something to defend myself with is the difference between two and three stars.”

Phil sighs and opens a drawer. Eventually he hands me a hammer that doesn’t look like it’s ever seen use.

“Thanks, Phil.”

The pillow’s gone out of the hole when I return, not on the floor so probably in the wall. I brush off my shoes and put them on. The hole itself is as it was, hardly large enough for me to crawl through and definitely not connecting the two rooms. Inside I see a lot of dust and a few more scraps that the thing left behind. I’m calling it mold, now, for sure. Some sort of roving, mean, wall-infesting mold.

There’s no answer when I tap on the wall with my hammer so I start peeling chunks back, confirming my suspicion that there’s little more than a couple of cardboard pieces dividing this place up. When the hole’s big enough I break through into my previous room.

There’s a lot of things from the wall in that old room. A few on the walls, several on the floor, and one on the side of the TV. They remain motionless, like startled spiders. I, too, am still until I hear the rustling sound of old newspaper from the other side of the wall and the jagged drapings of a thing peer over the edge of the hole.

Phil doesn’t get his hammer or his key back and he gets to keep the things I left in my room. I pull out of the motel parking lot in the rain and find a comfortable place on the side of the road to park and sleep. If I’m the one writing this book, I need to go into a little more detail as to why I call the places shitholes. If you visit this place, let Phil know I still gave him the extra star. A deal’s a deal, after all.

-traveler