Along the Highway by Barry W. North
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Along the Highway $8.95 |
My past, like a movie
I can't bear to watch but can't figure out how to
stop, keeps playing over and over again, inside my head. And worst of
all, the ending can never be changed, even if I get down on my knees and
pray and beg and bargain with God until I twist myself into a knot,
tight with sweat.
I still live beside the same noisy and grimy highway me and my sister
grew up next to. But I am about twenty-five miles further west in a
whole 'nother parish. Because of all the memories, I try to never go by
there. I don't drive myself, and if I go in the truck with my boyfriend,
I make him take the back roads to avoid it. My boyfriend tells me the
little restaurant where mama use to work burned down to the ground not
long ago, and the trailer we use to live in's been replaced by an old
metal building that's now a welding shop. It hurts to know it's all
gone, and the only thing left is what's in my mind.
Mostly, I just stay in the neighborhood, which is really just a few
blocks of rundown shacks and beat-up trailers, next to the highway. But
it's a whole world, all to itself. There is a grocery store, where I've
worked ever since I first turned eighteen, running the register and
stocking the shelves in the cooler. Across the highway is a dollar store
everybody around here calls Walmart. Everybody in the neighborhood, like
me, is pretty much just getting by. They're the kind of people rich
folks and snobs look at, laugh, and shake their heads. The women are
mostly on welfare, and even though most of them are not married, they
all call their boyfriends their "old men." I still call Billy, "my
boyfriend," because I don't want him to think we're permanent. The truth
is, he's got enough ideas in that direction on his own. He don't need
any help from me.
The men in the neighborhood bring in just enough money to pay the rent, buy groceries, beer, cigarettes, and a little weed. The men and women, both, are all tattooed up. When they're home, the men walk around like grandpas-in old shorts, white undershirts, and crocks. Some of them are so skinny, and so covered with tattoos you can't make out because they all run together, that I swear they look like ballpoint pens all the ink has leaked out of. I don't say that to make fun of them because I know each one of those tattoos means something to them. Besides, I have a tattoo myself. It's my sister's name, Tiera, tattooed in a half-moon, just below my neck, so that it looks like a necklace I'm wearing.
2010 A. E. Coppard Prize Story
With unflinching authenticity and intelligent compassion, Barry W. North has created in Along the Highway a first person narrator we can respect as we recognize she is too fine for the grimy fate that binds her. Even more than the socio-economic and biological determinisms that surround her, she is ironically undone by her own most sympathetic qualities: the love and consequent guilty responsibility she feels for her tragic younger sister. Are we our sisters' keepers? How does a person (and should she) let go of love and responsibility in order to get on with life?
Tom Smith, contest judge
About the Author:
Barry North lives in Hahnville, La. with his wife
Diane. He worked as a refrigeration mechanic for the St. Charles Parish
School System for twenty-eight years. Since his retirement in 2007, his
work has appeared in, or is scheduled to appear in, Slipstream,
Aries, The Louisiana Review, Willard & Maple, Art Times,
The Iconoclast, Ginosko, Edgz, Ancient Paths,
and many others. This is his first chapbook publication.