The stranger shook his head in the negative so voraciously I would’ve only been a little surprised if the thing had tumbled off into the bushes. “No, no, I’m finer than frog hair, I swear it. I just come here to say a few words is all. I heard you was in town and figured I’d make my way over here before sun sets a-yonder.”

  His eyes focused on me so suddenly, and so absolutely, that I took a step backward. They cleared as he looked at me, any sense of the rambling, sad, stumbling persona gone.

  “Me?” I asked, feeling rather stupid, as if our positions in the odd situation had just switched. “Do I know you?”

  “You... You knew my papa.”

  I find it impossible to describe the change that came over his face when he said this, and, as I recognized the resemblance that I saw there, the even greater transformation that came over me. All color drained from his pallor, as I’m sure it did from mine, seeming to magically mutate into storm clouds above us, making the world suddenly and blackly dark.

  I know that my mouth opened in that moment, that I intended to speak, but I can’t recall if any words actually came out.

  “Now don’t go judging me,” the stranger said, an almost visible wall of defense shimmering before him. “I ain’t nothin’ like my daddy and I ain’t got nothin’ in my blood that’ll ever make me so. Sins of the father and all that—ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of horse shit.”

  The man on the porch, standing before me, facing the home where my own grandmother had birthed my mother, was Dicky Gaskins. You’ve heard me mention his father in this telling, and a chance meeting I had with him as a little innocent, fresh off the joy of meeting a fake Santa Clause. That was but our first encounter, and the last to ever be pleasant.

  “You’re Pee Wee Gaskins’ boy, huh?”Dad said in a breathless whisper. Again, something rang untrue in his tone. I had the feeling he knew very well who the guy was but for some reason didn’t want me to know that.

  Dicky nodded, trying his very best to put on a look of humility—all bowed head and sunk shoulders, hands clasped before him sanctimoniously. “Yes, sir, I am. And I’ve spent every last day of my wretched life trying to apologize for it. I ain’t my daddy.”

  I don’t think I’d moved a muscle in these long, eternally tormenting moments. A better storyteller than I would’ve set things up properly, so that you could know the hellish dread that had settled upon me. But there is a method in my madness (said the Bard) and I ask your patience as my story unfolds. Suffice it to say that I would’ve felt no more fright and dismay if Satan and all his devils had stepped upon my parent’s lawn.

  “Get the hell out of here,” I said, fighting my instinct to rain blows upon this kin of my plague. “Don’t say another word and get off my dad’s property.” If blood were said to boil in anger, mine was downright cooking like a stew. I felt the heated flush in the skin of my face.

  “You’re gonna hear what I come to say,” Dicky Gaskins insisted.

  I yelled something at him then, something laced with every word my mom taught me to never say. Then a compulsion took over, as if I’d been emotionally hijacked, and I barreled forward, grabbing Dicky by the shirt, pushing him ahead of me. Finding strength I didn’t know I had, I lifted him clear off his feet and slammed his back onto the concrete floor of the porch, heard the air rush from his body. No matter his ancestry, the look of genuine terror that came over him triggered a spate of unwanted guilt deep inside me. All the same, I reached back my hand, balled into the mightiest fist I’d ever wielded, and readied to punch him in his vulnerable, weak, Pee Wee Gaskins-like face.

  “Dad?”

  It was a soft voice, angelic. Coming from my right. Holding my fist in its position, hovering somewhere between Dicky and the heavens, I looked over. All four of my kids stood there, watching my fit of rage. They must’ve gone out back to come round the side yard. Hazel had spoken, but the harrowing tone of her simple word had conveyed properly the feelings of them all. Even Wesley, who I often thought of as someone older and wiser than I, stared with a childlike confusion. Although I might’ve expected it more of Mason, Logan whimpered, tears streaming down his cheeks.

  I snapped out of my trance. Stumbling, I lifted myself off of Dicky and scooted backwards until my shoulders hit the front wall of the house. Dad still stood at the open screen door, motionless and silent.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, although I’m certain no one heard it, least of all my children, to whom I was really speaking.

  “It’s no problem,” Dicky said, misunderstanding, rising to his feet as he dusted himself off. “Now let’s get down to—”

  “Just go!” I yelled, now angrier at what he’d made me do in front of my kids than anything else. “Just leave and never come back!” My eyes weren’t focused on him, however. They rested squarely on Wesley, who studied me like the wisest owl from every children’s fantasy tale.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t so worried about Wesley—all of them—seeing my temper tantrum as I was about being forced to explain the reason behind it. In Dicky’s face I saw his dad, and in his dad I saw everything bad that had ever happened to me.

  I was standing now, breathing as if I’d done a hundred sit-ups. My kids needed to hear words from me, needed to understand my reaction. I’d thought to spare them these horrors, but no other choice lay before me. I opened my mouth to speak, with no idea what might come out.

  “Guys, listen...”

  But that’s as far as I got. Dicky made a gagging, retching sound, a sharp exhale of noise that echoed across the lawn. I looked at him, bewildered—reflecting back, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t feel the least bit of concern, only a morbid curiosity. It had been a strange sound, one of those unnatural sounds that, when coming from a human body, makes one immediately understand that something has gone terribly wrong, that death is knocking and only a doctor can keep it outside the door.

  Dicky spasmed on the ground, both hands clasped around his own neck. Eyes bulging, face puffy and red—shading toward purple, tendons sharp as piano strings beneath his skin, the man writhed in agony on the edge of the porch. He finally toppled off of it, falling the three feet that had once seemed a dozen to me. A blooming azalea bush squashed under his weight. All the while, those awful noises coming from his throat filled the air.

  “Dammit, do something!” my dad shouted, at everyone and no one.

  The kids, huddled close for protection, a little pack of wolves, had come around the front of the porch, keeping their distance but unable to not watch. The fear in their eyes was something I’d hoped would never assail them, and it was only the first of my many failures that summer.

  “David!” Dad was finally leaving his perch at the screen door, heading for the spot where Dicky had fallen. I’d needed to hear my name to snap me out of my trance, but I moved quickly, and got to the writhing, suffering man first. I jumped down into the azaleas, feeling the prick of their branches, knelt, felt more pricks, and assessed the situation.

  Our visitor was in bad shape. His entire face resembled an awful bruise, the skin so puffy it might’ve popped if stuck by a pin. It was a wonder his eyes stayed inside his head they bulged so much from their sockets. No physician needed for this diagnosis—the man was choking and about two licks from dying right there in the bushes. But unless I’d missed Dicky clandestinely pull a Slim-Jim out of his pocket and start munching away, I couldn’t imagine what had lodged in his gullet to make him suffer so.

  “Dad, call a doctor!” My hands hovered in the air, fingers outstretched, not a single one amongst the ten with a clue of what to do, Dicky twisting, gagging, squirming below them. The purple marshmallow of his face looked ready to burst, if his eyes didn’t do it first. He was on his back, staring toward the sky as if he expected angels to come take his soul away.

  “Dicky,” I said, trying to hide the terror in my voice. “Be still a second. I need to...” I didn’t know what I needed. What he needed. I reached down and touched his hands, still clasped around his neck, then his chest, then the area around his mouth, which was open wide—he’d gone quiet, which meant it had gotten worse. “Dicky! I’m gonna try the Heimlich maneuver!” As if announcing my intention would make me any more capable of doing it.

  Digging into the azaleas with my knees for support, I grabbed Dicky’s shoulder and heaved him onto his side, then onto his stomach. I straddled his back, then wrapped my arms around his body, clasping my hands at his stomach, the branches beneath him scraping my skin. More than aware that I wasn’t strong enough to pick Dicky up, I squeezed him tight and did my best to lift him.

  “Get up!” I grunted. “Dicky, get up!” I pumped my arms in and out, digging my two-handed fist into his abdomen each time, while simultaneously trying to get my feet under me to stand. If only it had been a safety drill, my kids would’ve had a good laugh at how ridiculous I must’ve looked. “Dicky, get your ass up, man!”

  Somewhere in the midst of all that struggling and silent retching and dying, Dicky’s brain still had its synapses sparking, because he heard me and was able to do the little he could to get us both in a standing position. Once we were upright, I was able to do the famous Heimlich maneuver more properly. I know because I’ve seen a million movies.

  But it wasn’t working.

  I heaved my fists into his stomach, pulling with all the force I knew, lifting his entire body with the effort. He came down and I did it again. We repeated this hapless dance at least a dozen times to no effect. Dicky was obviously weakening now that his air pipe had been completely blocked. The man was fading, dying, right in my arms.

  A heavy force slammed into my side, a bony shoulder that shocked me when I saw it belonged to my son, Wesley. He’d hit me hard enough to loosen my grip on Dicky, and the man fell to the ground once again, this time missing the bushes; he flopped onto the grass, his eyes no longer bulging.

  “It’s his tongue, Dad,” Wesley said. I’m not sure, in my entire life, I’d ever heard a more confusing string of four words put together. At least in the heat of the moment, it made not the least bit of sense to me.

  “Huh?” I asked dumbly, but Wesley hadn’t waited on a response. He’d dropped to the ground, kneeling so that his knees touched one purple, puffy cheek of Dicky. Then I watched in amazement as my son squeezed the man’s cheeks—squeezed hard—with one hand while using the other to force Dicky’s mouth open. It resisted at first, but then popped open as easily as a soap bubble bursting. Wesley reached into the gaping maw of the mouth with the hand that had been pinching Dicky’s face. The hand went deeper and deeper, Wesley’s bottom lip bit between his own teeth as he looked sideways at the ground with an intense expression of concentration. I’ll swear to the day I die that his arm disappeared all the way to the elbow.

  “Got it!” Wesley yelled. He pulled his hand out of Dicky’s mouth and collapsed backwards into the azalea bushes. As for Dicky, he was now heaving in breaths, one after the other, sucking and blowing air like a human bellows. Then came the coughing and choked gasps and all the other unpleasant sounds you’d expect from a man who’d almost died swallowing his own tongue.

  I was close enough to the edge of the porch to sit down in a daze. Everything around me had become surreal. My other kids were all crying now. Dad was nowhere in sight. The air seemed too still to be natural, as if the substance of the universe had locked into place.

  The bizarre string of occurrences once again flashed before my mind. The son of a serial killer shows up at our door, the son of the man who’d done more harm to me than all the other villains of my life—great and small—combined. This son of a killer said he came to see me. He then choked on his own tongue, for no apparent reason. And my son, who’d never showed us the slightest hint that he knew the first thing about saving a person in such dire straits, had done just that.

  But as strange as it all was, I must tell you that what lay beneath the surface—what had truly transpired in those terrifying moments—was a thing so dark that I can’t bear to describe it just yet.

  We must now go back to where it all began.

  Chapter Four

  March 1989

  Lynchburg, South Carolina

  16 Years Old

  1

  All the horrors of my life can be traced back to one day—the day that Andrea Llerenas and I went for a walk in the woods.

  It started when Andrea uttered the words that destroyed my heart. The words that almost literally hurt my ears as the vibration of her sound waves passed through those waxy canals. Words that slashed and burned and ruined what I had thought was the most perfect young woman to ever walk the earth.

  “Led Zeppelin is no better than all those other hair-bands you listen to.”

  We were walking along the old abandoned train tracks, their long rails still straight if not a little rusted and worse for wear. Every good thing that comes with the end of winter and the onset of spring was in full view around us. Oak trees and birches and maples dressed themselves with green leaves, taking some of the glory back from the pines that had stood their ground through the cold months. The undergrowth of the forest was alive again, the bushes and vines and weeds filling in those lonely, wintry gaps, making the whole place seem crowded and happy. There were even flowers peeking out, some reds and blues, but mostly yellows at this early stage. It all smelled fresh and vibrant, somehow made all the stronger by the constant hum of insects, a buzzy roar that becomes its own kind of silence.

  We were surrounded by beauty and I walked with the greatest friend I’d ever known, as happy a moment as I can remember, until she said those words and dampened the mood.

  “Wait a second,” I said, stopping to stand on one of the rotted wooden railroad ties. “I think my hearing just hit the skids.” I stuck a pinkie in my ear and gave it a wiggle as if digging for worms. “You can’t possibly have just said what I think you just said. Even though you said it. I’m pretty sure you said it but you couldn’t...” I gave up trying to be funny.

  “Mmm hmm,” Andrea replied, “that didn’t make much sense, but okay. Poison, Skid Row, Guns ’N Roses, Led Zeppelin—they’re all the same. And by same I definitely mean crappy.”

  Still perched atop the rotten wood, my feet sinking as if it were clay, I rubbed my temples with both hands. “All right, first of all, that’s wrong on at least two levels. For one thing, every single one of those bands is awesome. But, Led Zeppelin is nothing like them. Totally different. Totally another level. I mean, they’re all awesome, but... Zeppelin is awesomer.”

  “Do they all have long hair?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Do they all wear ridiculous clothes?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Do they all have that excruciating guitar solo in the middle that no one wants to listen to?”

  “They’re not the same. All awesome, one is awesomer. End of discussion.”

  “So eloquently spoken I don’t know how I can possibly argue any further.” She folded her arms and exaggerated a sigh of defeat. “Except to say that they all suck.”

  “Yeah, not nearly as good as Madonna and Tiffany.”

  “Take that back. Take that back right now.”

  But even as she said the words, a laugh was rising from her chest and she pulled me into a hug, wrapping her arms around my neck. A few kisses might’ve followed.

  How to describe the pure pleasure of those three things—her laugh, her hug, her kiss. I’m not one to embrace the cheese when it comes to matters of love, but she embodied happiness for me, a beacon of pure joy amongst the darkness and fog that so often accompanies the teenage years. If she hadn’t been in my life over the next couple of months, I’m absolutely certain I wouldn’t have survived.

  She stepped back, sadly dropping her arms away. “Can we please go find the path now?”

  “If you insist.” I took a moment to admire her—the brown hair, the brown skin, the sharp curve of her cheeks. But it was the eyes—so dark and so full of intelligence, a window to her brilliant mind—that were always my favorite. She was my favorite.

  “Why are you staring?” she asked.

  “Just trying to look into your soul. Trying to see if you could possibly be so damaged that you think Led Zeppelin and Poison are the same.”

  “That’s it. No more lame band talk.”

  She turned and ran, and I gave chase.

  2

  Like most things in life, there were pros and cons to living in the farm country of South Carolina. I won’t go into the cons right now—of which there were plenty (again, like most things in life)—but the pros were pretty magnificent. No 12-lane highways, no smog, no gangs, no traffic; in other words, things that big-city folk had to deal with. Was there some naivety in all this? Of course. Looking back, I was a ridiculous person in so many ways. But we were content.

  The greatest pro of all was the sheer... expanse of the environment in which we lived. Vast stretches of fields, forests, and swamps—nothing around those parts ever seemed to quite come to an end. Andrea and I loved to explore, and I swear we could’ve done it for 10 hours a day for 10 years and still have had wonders galore left to discover. Hidden rocks beneath the surface of the swamp, stepping stones to a little island that no one else knew about. Family cemeteries in the middle of nowhere, their creepy grave markers covered in grime and kudzu. Creeks full of crawdads, waiting to be captured and set free again, leaving a pinch or two just to remind everyone who’s boss. Trees to be climbed, lakes to be swam, rivers to be waded, fruit trees to be ransacked. All of it, there for the taking, there to be relished.

  But the woods were my favorite. The endless variety of trees, some thick of trunk and as old as the first settlers, some thin and straight and reaching the sky, all of them with their own scents and bountiful leaves and needles. The kudzu, that creeping vine that grows faster than babies and covers anything in its path—I’ve seen entire houses lost under its heavy green skin. The undergrowth, the squirrels, the deer, the intermittent meadows filled with wildflowers, that buzzy roar of the insects already mentioned. It was a haven for me, and if my family and society hadn’t generally frowned upon such a thing, I would’ve gladly lived like Mowgli amongst the wolves. Except that we didn’t have any wolves.