Valentine’s Day in Georgia is a snot-yellow drizzle, a hospital ward where the patients have already given up. Outside, brown kudzu swallows the town—snaking over abandoned hulls, collapsing porches, and telephone poles. It’s an inheritance that inches inward, never quitting.
I stare at the shrine: a dung-heap of rain-soaked bears and letters smeared with red lipstick. It’s for the Cupid Killer. Sick-ass women worship him like a dark saint, convinced his “message” was about carving away the rot of fake romance with a hunting knife. The truth is he was just a butcher with a movie-star face. I have to look at that same face every time I pass a glass door. The man was my father.
Mama isn’t winning any prizes for her mug, either. Whatever looks she had were stolen by a pipe and a habit that smells like burning rubber. When Spike, the meth-head next door, brings the poison over, I flee. I grab a sleeping bag and camp under the stars, watching my time run short. I’ve got two choices: lose my skin to meth-scabs like Mama, or take a shiv in the shower like Daddy.
Okay Drew, quit stewing over the old man and grab the gift for your girl. Lorelai—smelling like spearmint body mist and wearing Walmart lingerie—always whispers in my ear, “I love you so much it hurts.” I swallow hard, wanting to tell her the truth: I’ll be the one who hurts you, because I don’t know how to do anything else. I have to let her go, and Valentine’s Day is a shitty day for it. But something is rattling loose inside me, and I know if it breaks, it’ll take her out first. I’ll end it tonight. Maybe this “Made in China” stuffed dog can soften the hit. I grab the helium balloons that say “Be Mine” and walk out into the cold, my father’s footprints already waiting for me in the mud.
The cheap, sticky fur of the smirking dog feels like the cellophane on those candy hearts. That’s how far back the curse went. Mama plopped my butt in a chair when I was seven yakking how my friends had daddies who worked hard, drank beer, and cheered on the Dawgs, and how my daddy was written about in crime books as being the nastiest serial killer in the southern US. Good for you Daddy, I guess. Go big or go home they always say.
“It’s in the blood, Drew,” she rasped, the dark circles beneath her eyes hanging heavy like wet blankets on a clothesline. “That killing gene of your Daddy is just waiting to explode inside you. You gotta fight like hell to stop it.” She gave me a pat on the head, dumped a handful of peanuts into a bottle of piss-warm coke, and told me to go outside and play.
We had a slew of grubby-handed goblins running wild in “Peaceful Pines” trailer park. They snapped up sticks from the dirt and poked and prodded each other like ranchers branding steer. Sometimes they’d grab a clump of rocks and hurl ‘em at each other’s dicks—laughing their asses off whenever someone took a hit to the nuts and screamed in agony. They never asked me to play. I stood alone on the side while those assholes-in-training launched whatever was in their shit-stained hands at my head, shouting, “Cupid Killer! Cupid Killer!” I raced back inside crying, asking Mama why they hated me so much.
Her answer was a rusty nail jabbed in my throat. “It’s because they see your Daddy in you. His seeds have been thrown in your dirt. They’re barely sprouting now, but someday they’ll grow into a big ass tree and those thick branches will wrap around their throats, twisting tight, crushing bones until their eyes pop out. You’ll choke out the life of those you hate.”
“But Mama, I don’t hate anybody. I’m a good boy.”
A brown banana smile snuck across her face. “ Your Daddy was a good man too when I married him. He kept the demons stashed away in the dark cellar of that bat-shit crazy brain of his. But that crazy can only be hidden for so long. He played in Atlanta. Fancy-ass apartments with doormen and shit. He’d creep upstairs, hunt them in their beds, and plunge the butcher knife into their hearts. Then he slit their throats and stuffed the gashes with pastel candy hearts—the kind that said “Hug Me” or “True Love.”
“It’s growing inside you, boy,” she whispered. “And unless you find a way to fill your heart with something besides blood, you’re gonna end up just like him—chopping up pretty things because you can’t stand to see ‘em shine.”
Mama paused, the cold sores smeared across her lips like play-dough gone bad. She flicked off a scab. “Church! It’s your only hope to outrun the devil. Get dunked! Do whatever you can to get yourself saved.”
I stared blankly. I never saw Mama crack the spine of a Bible; her only use for it was as a coaster for her beer. She never darkened the door of a church except for Thanksgiving handouts for us white-trash pieces of shit. But I decided to listen. I’d do it. I’d earn my salvation the hard way—sitting in a bone-hard pew, getting spit-sprayed and Bible-thumped by a man of God.
I became a member of the Calvary Hill Chapel bus ministry. It farted a cloud of black oily smoke that tasted like a garage floor and blasted its horn outside our trailer every Sunday at 8 AM prompt. Stepping onto the bus, a blast of wet sticky air clinging to my face, I’d feel like hurling and wondering what slob took a leak in here while we sat crammed shoulder to shoulder with our faces and hair crusted with food and purple bruises and welts slapped all over our bodies; we were all the same child and our fathers were in prison or dead or unknown. But none of them had a monster sleeping inside of them. They were regular-flavor losers. Me? I was the one with the blue ribbon.
The only reason I didn’t bolt back into the trailer was the man behind the wheel. Phineas Jones. The neighborhood called him PJ, but to me, he was the only adult who didn’t look at me like I was an unexploded pipe bomb. He didn’t wear the cheap, shiny suits the preachers favored. PJ wore grease-stained Dickies and ratty camo jackets stained with deer blood and RedMan tobacco. When I climbed those accordion steps, he’d reach out a hand—wide as a catcher’s mitt —and give my shoulder a squeeze. It wasn’t the creepy, stay-awhile touch of the “holy men” back at the chapel; it was the solid grip of a real dude checking to see if the frame was still straight.
“Mornin’, Drew,” he’d rumble. “You ready to outrun ’em today?”
He never said who “them” was—the demons, the bullies, or my own DNA—but he knew. While the preacher was waiting at the end of the line to count our souls like poker chips, PJ was the one who actually sat in the diesel fumes with us.
My first Sunday School lesson ever was on Jesus, The Good Shepherd. The teacher’s voice was a wobbly sheet of tin flapping in the wind. “Jesus is knocking at the door of your heart, just hopin’ you’ll let him in to sweep the floors clean.”
If Jesus moved in then my dirtbag Daddy would have to move out! I rose from my seat and shouted, “Give it to me now!” The teacher, a redhead woman with scrunched up eyebrows and yellow teeth, flinched as if she’d been punched.
“Uh, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for Pastor to do that. I need to attend to the grape juice you spilled on the carpet.” She turned away and I saw her shoulders shuddering in fear, like I was a wolf cub instead of a lamb.
I was fixing to bolt from this place and head to the safety of my metal box when PJ appeared in the doorway. The sunlight hitting his face made him look built from legos—sharp, unbreakable, the kind of man who’d draw blood if you stepped on him wrong. He stood there, unblinking, shaking his head slowly.
“The stain will come out Miss Peggy,” PJ said, his voice a blaring brush hog mower. “But the boy won’t if you keep looking at him like he’s already dead.”
Miss Peggy’s Bible was a shield clutched to her chest. “Phineas, I’m just a volunteer, unequipped to handle his needs.” She knelt down on the carpet scrubbing away the stain with her rotary blade hands.
PJ smirked and placed his baseball mitt-hand on my shoulder, the texture rough and cracked like an unhealed scab.
“Pastor’s busy waxing his Cadillac and picking out his silk tie,” PJ said. “You want that new heart? You don’t need a golden altar. You just need to ask, right here on this stained rug. Can’t think of a better place than that.”
I prayed for Jesus to kick out my freeloading Daddy for good. For a brief moment, the door slammed shut on the smell of melting tires and rotten eggs. I actually believed the handprints of my father had been erased. I couldn’t wait to tell Mama.
After PJ dropped me off, I raced inside. “Guess what Mama? Guess what?!”
She eyed me coldly, her expression a flattened dishrag in the sink. “Quit your squawking dipshit, Spike’s asleep. If you wake him there will be hell to pay.”
I told her anyway. “At church today I let Jesus come into my heart. It means the seeds are gone!”
Mama was a block of stone and her hands were lobster claws digging deep into her face, scraping away the invisible bugs. When she spoke, I could swear I saw exhaust fumes coming out of her mouth.
“Your Daddy did that too. Cried like a baby, tearing down that long aisle like a damn fool. Collapsed at Preacher Pretty Boy’s feet, hollering, ‘Give me Jesus.’” She paused, hocking a foaming green loogie into a Burger King cup. “Jesus didn’t stick around. Two weeks later your daddy slashed a young couple to death in Marietta.”
A baseball-sized lump lodged in my throat. Jesus didn’t stick around? Well, I’d make him stick. I became the most saved child in the state of Georgia, getting dunked monthly for a year until my skin smelled like a YMCA pool.
Eleven baptisms later, I stood there, waiting for my twelfth dip, when a hand—a real hand, rough as a grit-shifter—clamped onto my shoulder.
It was PJ, his bus driver cap tucked under his arm. “Son, you’ve already done this salvation and baptism thing a hundred times! Save the water for someone else and start thanking God that you’re good to go.”
Hands shaking, I sputtered, “But what if it doesn’t take? Daddy got dunked and he still jammed knives in people. I don’t want to be like my daddy.”
PJ’s face and hands scrunched tight and behind his glasses it looked like the windshield wipers were broken. He leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Do you like donuts?”
I nodded yes. “Okay kid, let’s get out of here. I know a place that has bear claws as big as your arm.”
I never walked the aisle of that Christian Taj Mahal again. My church was a rusted-out bus, shredded vinyl seats held together with duct tape, springs poking out, stabbing asses, the inside still reeking of piss and poverty. I wasn’t a lamb in a pew, I was PJ’s copilot.
We didn’t sing those dusty-ass hymns from the 1800s, looking like Mr. Peanut in a monkey suit, cane tapping along to “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” On the Calvary Hill bus we screamed rock anthems, blasting “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” until the windows shook. Who said a guitar solo couldn’t bring you closer to Jesus than some organ music played by a stick-up-her-butt woman who wouldn’t even look you in the eye? Our choir was the tossed-away, the stained, the bruised, the left-behind. We wore our wounds right out in the open where God could see ‘em.
I’m twenty-one now but I’m still on that bus in my head, rattling the windows singing “The Wheel In the Sky,” trying to drown out Mama’s voice about seeds and blood, wondering about kudzu and why you can’t burn, poison, pull, or chop it away. It doesn’t die because you want it to. No. It’s a tricky bastard waiting for the right kind of rain, or the right kind or devil, to show up and remind you that you can’t outrun your blood.
It all starts with an ambush this morning, by a beta cuck in a pair of ball-hugging skinny slacks. Mama’s hiding behind the shadow of the dying Hickory in our yard, counting out the Benjamins, her eyes duller than old apple cores. Mr. Fancy Pants gives me this limp-dick, raw chicken handshake introducing himself as a hotshot producer from New York City. He’s shooting a six-part series about daddy, called “The Cycle of the Blade,” offering me five thousand dollars cash for a two-hour interview. Before I can say “kiss my ass,” he whips out a camera and starts filming me.
“Mr. Martin, in quiet moments do you ever find yourself gazing at your hands and wondering if they’ll stay still? Your mother said you have your father’s hands and that they have a mind of their own. Do you worry about that? And if so, how do you escape that fear?”
I clench my jaw, nearly biting off my tongue to keep from talking or punching him in his smug face. I beat a trail to my truck, head down so I don’t have to look at the snake. He chases me shouting questions. I slam the door shut as he shoves the camera in my window and asks one last thing: “Are you capable of continuing your father’s legacy?” I don’t even look if his foot is under my tire but I burn rubber, skidding across the grass, tearing off like a bat out of hell.
I drive straight to the only house that doesn’t smell like rot.
PJ sits at his kitchen table, a box of bear claws and a mug of coffee in front of him. He doesn’t reach for a gun or a phone. He just looks at me with those tired, catcher’s-mitt eyes.
“You lied, PJ,” I rasp, pressing the tip of the hunting knife against the pulse in his neck. “You told me the dirt was changed. You told me I was good to go. But look at me! Look at my mother counting blood money on the porch. Look at that vulture in the skinny slacks. They don’t see a ‘Sweet Child.’ They see a butcher.”
I want him to flinch. I want him to admit that he sold a seven-year-old kid a fairy tale.
“I never cared about the water, PJ. I only cared about you. And you gave me a map to a place that doesn’t exist.”
PJ doesn’t move. He reaches out, grabs a bear claw, and takes a bite. He chews it slow, the powdered sugar dusting his lip.
“I didn’t give you a map to heaven, Drew. I gave you a map to yourself. If you want to throw it away and start slicing and dicing because some dipwad in NYC told you to, then go ahead. But don’t you dare blame me because the road got rocky.”
He leans into the blade. A tiny bead of red—real, human blood—appears at the tip of the knife.
“You want to be the Cupid Killer? Then push. But if you want to be my copilot, then put the steel down and eat a damn donut. Your choice, son. It’s always been your choice.”
I stare at that bead of blood. It’s small. It’s bright. It’s the first thing I’ve seen all day that isn’t snot-yellow or rot-brown. And suddenly, the “seeds” stop scratching. They don’t die—they just go quiet.
The knife feels heavy. Too heavy. Clack. It hits the linoleum. The sound is louder than any rock anthem we ever sang on that bus.
PJ doesn’t say “I told you so.” He doesn’t hug me. He pushes the box of donuts across the table.
“Good to go, Drew?”
I swallow hard, the lump in my throat finally dissolving. “Good to go, PJ.”
I walk out of that house and get back in the Chevy. I drive past the silver SUV, past the dying Hickory, and straight to Lorelai’s. She’s standing on her porch, smelling like spearmint and looking for me.
I don’t tell her I’m cured. I don’t tell her the monster is gone. I just hand her the “Made in China” dog and the helium balloons.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, baby,” I whisper.
She smiles, and for the first time in my life, I don’t see a reflection of my father in the window behind her. I just see a guy with a messy face, a loud truck, and a choice.
[Image Credit : Photo by A Chosen Soul on Unsplash]
by 
Jill Williams
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