Emma Kerkman
Killdeer Church
My mother always warned me about the highway. It takes you places you don’t want to go, through towns that don’t want you, to people who’ll cast you aside like a cardboard Starbucks tray on the Belt Loop. It kills things; deer, hitchhikers, old tires, and dreams.
But somehow, it didn’t kill the tiny church.
The drive between Sioux Falls and Rapid City is devoid of everything except farmland, coal trains, and shredded tires. It’s dotted with small town after small town after dead town— until you get to Wall. Wall is like the name implies—a wall of false truths, empty promises, and outright lies designed to separate you from your money. It’s made of tourist traps, bright lights, screaming children, strange wax mannequins, and an eighty-foot tall dinosaur that presides over I-90, beckoning you to stand beneath it and take a corny photo to send to your family group chat without context. It’s the kind of place you avoid seeing in full daylight, if at all possible, because of the sheer disappointment in both its ugliness and its insincerity.
I will not be stopping in Wall.
It wasn’t my intent to stop at all during the five hour drive, but I had to pee. That’s how a lot of good stories start—too much coffee between 5am and 7am.
The rest stop was nothing special. I passed the big one with the giant Dignity Statue two hours ago. The second biggest rest stop with one of Whitwam’s giant concrete tipis was in a different part of South Dakota.
But there was a church.
I’d never seen a church at a rest stop before.
I parked in one of the two shady spots before heading inside. There were a few other cars in the lot, but I could only see an old couple walking their small dog around the fenced-in area.
The cold tap water was refreshing as I washed my hands, ignoring my tired expression in the corroded mirror. A good contrast to August trying to seep through the seams of the front door.
When I returned to the car, I felt the church watching me from the far end of the rest stop lawn. It sat apart from everything else, behind a chain-link fence only hip-height. There was a sign on the gate too far away to read.
Anything is better than wasting time in Wall, I thought, and walked towards it.
The gravel cart-trail through the toasted lawn sizzled underfoot, and a few mournful killdeer chirped in the tall grass when I passed. Morning glories bloomed in the unkempt prairie, mixing with horsetail grasses and white clover. Black flies sang in my ears, louder than the distant tires on pavement, and a set of blackbirds circled the marsh that bordered the walkway.
The gate was open when I got to it, the sign facing inward towards the church—which explained why I couldn’t read it before.
Stepping through the narrow entrance, I read Welcome! in faded red lettering. There was some irony in the welcome message facing the church’s front door—almost as if it was meant to welcome believers back to the real world once they came out from inside, not the other way around.
The church itself stood before me, white vinyl siding radiating heat from the sun. It was no larger than a shed, taking up enough consecrated ground for one coffin only, and honestly could’ve been a shed with a homemade porch tacked on. Two black two-by-fours made up the romanesque columns, hand-painted lovingly with uneven nails lining the sides. On the roof, a vaguely lopsided steeple peered down at me, and atop it was a killdeer.
She screeched at me, waving her broken wing, cautioning.
The door was ajar when I stepped up to it, so I nudged it open further with my toe. Inside, the shed looked more like an old-fashioned schoolhouse than a church. Four wooden pews, only as wide as school benches, and a narrow aisle leading to a lectern with four copies of the Bible and a set of leaflets used as bookmarks.
A logbook sat off to the side on a small antique chair. I picked up a pen from the cup labeled Donations Welcome! and added my name, as well as the date, on a whim. Outside, another killdeer screeched, and so did I.
*
“It’s so strange,” the bone-thin worker said to his heavyset friend, eyeing the empty way- station warily. “Where could she have gone? It’s not like there’s much out here except alfalfa and soybeans.”
“I agree, it’s a weird place to simply leave your car and wander off,” the other one replied, triple-checking the cable was secure before wandering back to the cab and activating the winch. “It happens, though.”
“It does?”
“Sure, every once in a while. Sometimes it’s folks walking away from a crappy hand in life, maybe foul play, maybe suicide by highway. And when they don’t come back, places like these turn into junkyards, spare-parts warehouses, whatever. Other times it’s a simple breakdown—people leave ‘em, and come back to find ‘em stripped of everything useful, right down to the axles. It’s nuts, man, this highway.”
The skinny man sighed, then crossed and uncrossed his arms. “Well, whatever it is, I don’t like it.” He glanced back at the car. “A woman nine months pregnant couldn’t walk real far out here in August.”
“Dunno,” the heavyset man replied, watching the winch work.
He sniffed, checked his watch, checked the winch, then clapped the skinny man on the shoulder before heading towards the vending machines, the early September chill not enough to keep him cool. As he walked, the unkempt grass ruffled with the breeze, and a small killdeer stumbled out of it, dragging a broken wing.
“Awe, got a nest around here, momma?” the man asked, gently. “Don’t worry. I’m more in the mood for a cold soda than I am a killdeer omelet.”
The killdeer chirped at him again, and when he came back with the soda, she led him away from her nest, all the way back to the tow truck. The two truck operators watched her hop onto the truck bed with another chirp, then fly off towards the tiny little church.
“As I said,” said the skinny man, turning back towards the woman’s car, “mighty strange.”
Truck Dog
“It’s dark out here,” I say to Suds, who’s sitting in the passenger seat with her head out the window. She looks at me side-eye, tongue flapping in the wind, as if to say you say this every time, mom. “Real dark out here.”
And it is. The stretch of road between Laramie and Rawlins, WY, is as dark as it is long, and as starless as it is empty. The moon sits densely in my rearview mirror, slowly drifting to the driver’s side as the night goes on.
I’m pushing late into the night, as I usually do. This section of road is always dangerous, but I find it worse during the day—passenger cars, cars with trailers, moving vans. Christmas is in a week, too, so there’s heavier traffic than normal, as well as snow. So I drive at night, when the commuters are soundly asleep, along with the cross-country movers and the other long- haulers who haven’t gotten smart yet.
It’s a long stretch of road. Long enough, in fact, that the fourth car pulled over in the center median, hazards on, doesn’t stick out during the snowstorm. What does stick out, however, is the man in the red puffer jacket laying stock-still widthwise across the left lane. There are people in the road near him, shouting and waving and jumping.
Suds boofs cautiously as we grow closer, and I lay off the breaks. “You’re right, Suds. I know.”
We’ve seen this before. I accelerate over the bump and watch the red-puffered man recede into the distance along with the moon.
*
Three hours later, the truck is running low on fuel. The winds from the day led to worse mileage than I expected. We’re twenty miles out from Rawlins, but we’re two miles out from Sinclair. I pull off at the Sinclair exit and admire the ring of bullet holes circling the I in Exit.
The Sinclair station is empty, as expected for this hour. The lights are on—they’re always on—and so are the pumps. I cut the turn a bit short to get into the parking lot and drag a small trench through the muddy median. I hope nobody noticed, and I pull in to the first pump in the row.
“Stay here,” I tell Suds, and she boofs at me once as I climb out of the cab.
The bell above the door chimes starchily as I enter the station. The clerk, a young hispanic-looking woman with her hair in a long braid, watches me as I walk past.
“It’s been a while,” she says in Spanish after I look through the shop once and pull a bottle of water from the fridge.
“Forty on pump one,” I say, putting exact change on the counter.
She punches it into the register. “That’s less than last time.”
“Don’t have as long to go before I stop for the night.” I take the water back.
“You’ve got guts in your grille,” she calls after me as I go towards the door. “Be sure to wash them off the concrete before you leave.”
“I’ll clean up,” I assure her, and the door closes to keep out the chill. It was just as cold inside the station as it is outside it.
I return to the pump and put the nozzle in my truck. I fill up the tank until there’s about half a gallon left on the pump, and stop.
“Bucket, Suds,” I call out, and Suds sticks her head out the window a moment later, a green plastic beach bucket in her mouth. It whacks against the window as she shoves it through, the only sound in the quiet evening.
I take it from her and fill it up with the last half gallon. I bring it with me inside the cab once the hose is put away, and set it on the floor of the passenger side. “Don’t spill,” I tell her, then turn the key in the ignition. The truck grumbles to life like a sleeping dog woken up by the smell of dinner. Suds sticks her head in the bucket, and I check my fuel levels. Just enough to make it until the next stop.
I pull out of the parking lot without adding a matching trench to the opposite side of the driveway, and admire the way the “Wrong Way” sign is peppered with so many bullet holes it’s completely illegible.
*
“It’s awfully dark out here,” I say, and Suds looks up from where her chin is resting on the windowsill, the gray around her muzzle shining silver against her short black fur. One of her eyes is clouded, and she blinks at me as if to say you always say that, mom.
“Look, there’s the moon.” I point it out to her even though she can’t see it too well. It looms overhead, peeking through the skylight above us. “It’s getting late. We’re going to need to stop again.”
Suds boofs in agreement, then boofs again and sits up, looking out the front windshield.
“Looks like someone hit something big,” I say as we go over the massive red-brown smear in the left lane. “Strange. There’s barely any traffic. It looks fresh.”
There’s a red puffer jacket in the bushes a few truck-lengths ahead. Further down the highway, there’s a small red sedan driving in the right lane, hazards on.
“Idiots are going to get themselves killed,” I tell Suds, grumpily. “They should just pull over for the night.”
Suds boofs in agreement, and we drive onward.
The horizon is lightening just barely when the low fuel light goes on. I drive another ten, fifteen miles, and the next exit sign emerges from the predawn darkness ahead of us. Rawlins is another twenty-five miles away—too far to go with what we have left—but Sinclair is seven miles away. It’ll be close, but we’ll make it.
Suds boofs at nothing as I take the exit, the trailer wheels humming over the rumble strip as I take the exit wide, avoiding the silvery metal shavings littering the road beside the sign. Hooligans, I think, but I can’t help appreciating the precision with which they outlined the letters on the exit sign with bullet holes.
I pull into the Sinclair station carefully, the driveway narrow enough that I nearly drag my left rear wheels into the median. I managed to avoid that, but it looks like some other driver wasn’t so lucky.
“Stay, Suds,” I tell her, and she wags her tail against the center console, but makes no move to get up. I roll the window down a little more before turning off the engine and going inside.
The clerk, a middle-aged Hispanic-looking woman with her hair pulled into a severe bun, eyes me as I walk in, but quickly goes back to her crossword puzzle. Her turquoise earrings are shaped like feathers.
I grab a bottle of tea and a bag of cheese crackers, as well as bison jerky sticks for Suds. “Forty on pump one,” I tell her. “I like your earrings.”
“Thank you,” she replies, scanning the items. “It’s been a long time since I last saw you.”
“Ah, yeah.” I scratched the back of my neck. “I usually stop in Rawlins.”
She looks at me from beneath her eyebrows. “I had to clean the parking lot last time. You didn’t clean it well enough. Do you need a bag?”
“No, I’ve got it,” I say, and scoop up my tea and my snacks.
“Wait,” she says, stopping me before I can leave. “Here, for your old girl.”
She hands me a milkbone from a jar under the counter, and I thank her for it, then leave.
Outside, I start fueling up the cab, and toss the milkbone up to Suds, who sticks her head out the window to catch it. The only sound outside is the sound of her crunching, as well as the rhythmic whirring-ticking of the pump. When there’s half a gallon left, I stop the pump and open the passenger-side door to find Suds’ bucket and fill it with what’s left. She gets off her seat stiffly when I put it in the footwell.
“Don’t spill,” I warn her as I climb back into the cab. The engine rumbles to life tiredly, and we chug lethargically out of Sinclair, merging back on the freeway to a steadily lightening horizon.
Suds leans her head against the window and closes her eyes, going back to sleep.
*
“It’s getting dark again,” I say, talking mostly to myself as I watch the moon rise along the highway before us. Suds still has her head on the windowsill, eyes closed as she breathes deeply and slowly. “There’s the moon, Suds. It’s awfully big today.”
Suds huffs out a long breath, fogging up the window for a few seconds, and we drive onwards. The road is long and empty for the next few hours or so, but by the time the moon is hanging below my rear view mirror like an air freshener, taillights of a small back-up appear on the horizon.
“Wonder what’s going on here?” I ask aloud, checking my dashboard clock for the time. It’s almost midnight again—usually, it’s quiet on the roads by now.
As we slow to match the speed of traffic, flashing red and blue lights appear over the tops of the cars, trailers, and moving vans collected before me. The closer we get to the accident, the more details I can see—a semi-truck jack-knifed and overturned in a ditch, veering off the right side of the road. The mile-marker sign is ripped out of the ground, lodged in the truck’s cab.
But there are too many cops and ambulances for a single-vehicle crash. A little further up the road, there’s also a little red sedan pulled over to the side, police clustered around it. They have four men in handcuffs, one standing out from the crowd in his red puffer jacket.
“Strange,” I said to Suds as we sped up once we cleared the crash. “That’s a bad accident for this time of night. Damn brake-checkers. I hope everyone’s okay.”
Suds doesn’t so much as blink at me, and I reach over to stroke the soft fur between her ears.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I sigh, putting my hands back on the wheel. “We’ll stop in Rawlins for the night. I’ll get you a snack then.”
The traffic from the back-up is a little distracting, so I focus on the road, squinting into the distance as we pass the sign telling us there’s twenty miles left until we reach Rawlins. There’s still too much traffic to turn on my high-beams, which makes it hard to see the road, as well as any obstacles along the way.
The exit sign for Sinclair appears off to my right.
“Boy,” I sigh, looking away from the road to pet Suds on the head again. “It sure is dark out here.”