Hook-Hand Man’s Last Night on Lovers’ Lane
by Patrick Barb
This is my last night on Lovers’ Lane. Hell, it’s Lovers’ Lane’s last night as Lovers’ Lane. Can a place—a narrow strip of crumbling, neglected blacktop leading to a dead-end roundabout where years ago kids (pimply, giggling; pushing; pulling; all elbows, thumbs, bra straps, and bite marks) from the local high school (“Go Bobcats!”) parked their parents’ sedans, killed the ignition, then sat for a minute, thinking, “What now?”—know it’s dying?
Used to be, I’d step out from the bushes, when headlights dimmed, and I’d have to pick each step so carefully, like a jeweler examining gemstones for inevitable imperfections. Didn’t want to have a Budweiser bottle crunched to so much dust under the tread of my boot, or slip on a condom and land ass first on busted asphalt, getting black streaks up and down the pants they lent me at the psych ward.
Now, the asphalt’s gone, along with the beer bottles and condoms—all three retired to some landfill that’s two towns over. You know, the town where the trash goes.
And the bushes? Those were uprooted with a backhoe a month ago. So I’m standing here with the big, bright moon—the moon that never looks away from my work—feeling a little exposed, to be honest.
I can hear crickets. Get out those chirps while you can, fellas. I don’t hear giggling, panting, those strange silences—those silences where someone pushes their partner away and looks around, before saying, “Did you hear that?”
There aren’t any borrowed sedans around to make the drive through the muddy soup that once was Lovers’ Lane. Whatever teenage lovers do at night in the town below, they do it down there and not up here.
Taking the bus to the free clinic two towns over, I sit in the back and cross my arms across stolen scrubs. No one gives a damn about the bloodstains anymore. He must be a chef. Maybe it’s rust. It’s none of my business.
I watch them now, the few that venture from their homes. They’d rather look at the screens of their phones than take the drive up Lovers’ Lane and look at—what?—the moon?
It’s enough to make me want to take my hook and slash it across the sign hammered deep into the dirt—hammered with an authority of ownership, a sense of This? This is mine. “REALTY DEVELOPMENT CORP. WORKING HAND-IN-HAND TO TRANSFORM YOUR TOWN.”
Hand-in-hand?
It’s like I’m some sort of joke. Reminds me of that young med student barely looking up from my scribbled-over chart before asking, “You know they’ve made incredible advancements in 3-D printing? We could give you your hand back.”
But, I don’t want my hand back. I want my hook. I have my hook. What I want back is the Lovers’ Lane asphalt and beer bottles and rubbers and boyfriends putting on a façade of bravado, opening the driver’s side door and stepping into the darkness, saying, “I’m sure it’s just the wind.”
Instead, I’ve got one flat-bed truck with a roomy cabin, and a demolitions man—his teen years a memory of the best days of his nothing-and-nowhere life—who got drunk enough to bring one of the girls who work the underpass, the one the bus takes you by as you leave the town two over from here, up through the deep tire tracks and gray, soupy mud to complete their transaction where only the moon can see.
Only the moon and me.
I’ll climb up on the running board and tap on the glass. Maybe drag my hook across the chrome shell of the truck. It’s better than nothing, right?
I bet he won’t even have his shirt off. Probably just stuck it through the zipper hole, couple pumps and a groan—a shiver, shake, and a stolen kiss against her neck. Some Lover, huh?
I’ll finish them both soon enough. Maybe leave them hung up over that sign—hand-in-hand.
It doesn’t matter. They’ll replace the orange safety tape with the yellow police caution variety for a few weeks. But green beats yellow every time, and no one gives a damn about a construction worker and streetwalker killed on a stretch of valuable real estate where some teens maybe died (no one can quite remember the specifics) years before.
Not when there’s progress to be made.
Give them enough time, and the bulldozers and steamrollers will lay waste to the mud and any remaining bits of asphalt. Lovers’ Lane will come down and someone will cut a ribbon and say, “This is an investment in the future of our town.”
And I’ll finally have to move on. Maybe to that town—the one that’s just one over from here. I read there’s an abandoned amusement park on the outskirts with a dispute over land rights they say could take years to resolve. I hope no one else read about it though. Hope no one thought, How cool, how hip, how trendy—just think what you could do with all that land.
Leave it for me. Leave something for me and the moon.
AUTHOR BIO: Patrick Barb is a freelance writer from the southern United States, currently living (and trying not to freeze to death) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His fiction appears in Nightscript VIII (forthcoming), Diabolical Plots (forthcoming), and Boneyard Soup Magazine, among other publications. His debut novella Gargantuana’s Ghost is coming from Grey Matter Press in August 2022. This story originally appeared in a somewhat different format in Shallow Waters Vol. 4 (Crystal Lake Publishing).
For more, visit patrickbarb.com or follow twitter.com/pbarb.
talesfrombetween.wordpress.com 