I finally get off the bus in Eugene, Oregon and there’s my Uncle John and he’s leaning against his big Tacoma truck waiting with my sister Zora and he wraps his big bear arms around my shoulders and my back and says, “Tony, it’s great to see you.”

My sister kisses me on both cheeks and holds my face with her skinny hands. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.” She looks at me hard through her dark hair hanging in folds around her big dark eyes and focuses, tracing my face with thin fingers, making sure I’m really here. She was only 15 then and had been living with my Uncle John and my Aunt Jamie and my little cousins Grace and Emma since she was 11, since my mom decided to die, and I’m ashamed as she searches my face frantically.

So I give her and my uncle my best imitation smile and my sister scrunches up her face and says, “Godammit Tony, you look like a fucking jack-o-lantern.”

My Uncle John likes this. He lets out a laugh that shakes him, “Ah-hah-hah-hah. That’s so good. He totally does, Zora – ah hah.”

And they’re both right. I’m skeleton skinny, barely 130 pounds now, all eyes and bones, and there’s a row of black stitches climbing out of the left side of my mouth like half-finished Halloween makeup and it does make me look sort of like a jack-o-lantern. I’d torn it open drunk and high on pills a week before when I threw myself down a flight of twenty stairs in the old apartment building where my cousin lived in St. Louis. The hinge of my mouth caught the edge of the metal railing on my way down and the corner ripped it ragged like a split seam. I still don’t remember any of it though. I woke up in intensive care while the doctor was threading the stitches in my face like my skin was patchwork and I was told a cop had dropped me off after he saw me stumbling alone in the dark, howling, my left cheek flapping.

And it seemed like a good idea to leave after that, to pack up everything and go somewhere safe, but I pretend it’s nothing now as I chuckle and follow the stitches in my cheek with a gnawed fingernail and I’m staring past both my Uncle John and my sister.

My Uncle John senses all this though, and he says in soft voice, “Come here, Tony,” and he pulls me over to him and my sister and as they hold me close I start to cry.

* * * *

My Aunt Jamie hugs me too, her hair tied up in a Grateful Dead bandana, when I walk into their house on the outskirts of Eugene on the side of a broken gravel road. It’s raining and she says, “Come inside before you get you get soaked all the way through.” And she understands what’s it’s like to be crazy just like my Uncle John understands, just like all my family understands because families like mine pass the crazy sickness down to each generation, they spike each new member’s blood with it, activating that mysterious DNA strand that makes a person wild and desperate and people like us either find a way out fast or die trying.

Grace scampers over to me next and when I bend down to her tiny face, she gives me a kiss on the forehead and as I walk past Emma she looks up from the doll she holds to her ear like a telephone and flashes me a no tooth smile and this smile is so perfect that I just want to fall to my knees right there, but Grace leads me down to the basement before I can let all those feelings overwhelm me.

And there’s a single bed set-up against the far wall away from all the stuffed animals scattered about the floor and the big yellow inflatable circle pad where my two cousins jump up and down and do somersaults and cartwheels. I put my big black duffel bag and my old blue back pack down and sit on the green and yellow and blue and black and red comforter covered with starfish and whales and octopuses and sea turtles all wearing big cartoon smiles. Grace points to a painting that’s taped to the wall next to the bed and there’s three flowers, a blue one, a red one, and a purple one, and they’re all reaching up towards an orange sun.

“That’s very pretty,” I say to her as she stares at the ground.

“Thank you,” she whispers still looking at the carpet, “I made it for you,” and she points to my face and then she races out of the room and back up the stairs.

And I lie down on the bed after she leaves and take off my shirt and I think about baby Emma’s no tooth smile and I think about the painting on the wall and the flowers reaching up to the sun. Then I think about all the bus rides and the thumb rides and about Minnesota and all those classes I will never take. And then I think about my sister and my uncle and then my father and my grandmother, and finally my mother. And I think about getting high and then I don’t and then I think about everything else all over again, but it still comes back, a vision, fresh and blinding as before, and I’m diving back down that well of apartment steps, arms extended like a cross, flying. And deep down that well something raises its ugly head, grinds its black teeth and I’m looking at death again – I’m swallowed up in unblinking eyes. And I’m so close, you see, I’m real, real close to a glimpse of something awful and real and memories replay fast forward in my brain like film shots – shaking hands with Coach at the football banquet, my father wailing like an animal and pressing his face to the grass at my mother’s funeral, smoking speed out of an apple juice jar in Santa Cruz, studying until I can’t see, blood on the wall, red flowers on a windowsill, broken bottles on the pavement.

And I just want to let the love in this house heal me. I want to wrap this love all around me and edit out all the sad parts, all the bad parts. But I’m still caught up in circles and I want to go farther out again towards the center of infinite unblinking eyes, believing still that that’s where the answers are all hidden, where everything will finally become clear. And I’m still thinking, throwing myself off cliffs and scrambling right back up them, when sleep finally makes me quiet.

* * * *

The next three months pass in a daze, a numb hum chain of moments. I drive around with my Aunt Jamie in her little green Toyota as she drops my sister off at high school, Grace off at pre-school, and picks up groceries at the organic food stores that are everywhere in Eugene. I play the tambourine and the xylophone at music classes with Emma and run around in a circle with all the other toddlers looking like a young Frankenstein. I wash the dishes and vacuum the floors and tile the bathroom with my Uncle John. I apply to drive a school bus. I interview to be the assistant to a bail bondsman. “I like that cut,” the big man with the mustache points to my cheek, “that’ll get you far in this business.”

I work for two weeks restoring a wetland outside Eugene, waking up at dawn and sloshing through the blue morning mud, pulling out tangles of weeds. I like this job, but the project ends so I sign up to go door-to-door asking for donations to the Save the Children fund. I stutter and skip words when I recite the facts about third world poverty and disease and famine and I feel bad asking people for money. I even apologize to a few after knocking on their doors, telling them to have a wonderful night and dinner and to love their children, to always love their children. I quit after three days, making $2.25 of commission from the only donation I get, a woman who tells me she thinks my stitches are sexy.

“Tony, what’s up with you man?” my Uncle John asks me that night sitting on the edge of my bed.

I stutter and look out the window at the fir trees and the rain and look at the wall and Grace’s flower painting. “I don’t – I don’t know. I’m just – I’m not happy.”

“Well, no shit,” my uncle laughs, “That’s obvious enough,” and he puts his arm around me, “You gotta open up more, man. You’re not letting anyone into that head of yours.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say and I look up at him, all big glasses and big nose and big belly and beard and I wonder how my Uncle ever used to sell magic mushrooms and cocaine, how he once killed a man in a bar fight. “Is it really that obvious?” I ask him.

“Yeah, Tony, it’s painfully obvious,” he says and there’s kindness in his eyes and there’s worry there too.

“Jesus, man,” I shake my head and smile, “I guess I can’t hide how fucked-up I am anymore.”

“Nope,” my Uncle grins, “and if you’re still trying to, I gotta tell you, you’ve been doing a pretty shitty job for awhile.”

We both laugh at this and I pause. I want to be honest with him. My Uncle is trying to help me. He’s letting me stay in his house where he’s already raised my sister for the last four years. He works 60 hours a week at a new tech job that barely pays enough, he’s got two little kids, and he’s still letting me stay here. This man is good. So I say, “It’s just – I don’t know Uncle John. Do you really want to know?”

“Yes, Tony, yes, c’mon man, of course I want to know. I love you.”

“Well . . . how do I say this?” And I really don’t know, but I try to let it all spill out of me as best as I can. I try to tell him how after my mom stopped living, I tried as hard as I could to be a good, to work hard, to study hard, to be a nice guy and all that, to focus and love and give and I did those things, but still nothing was right with me inside. I talk about working at everything even harder, pushing myself farther, hoping maybe I might be able to learn enough, to take away enough meaning from books and people to figure my life out, to figure everyone else’s lives out, to fit myself into all these other lives. And I tell him how I thought, ‘Maybe if I go somewhere far away . . .’ and so I went all the way out to Minnesota, thinking that maybe leaving California would solve things. But I had no place there and I couldn’t control the drugs or the drinking anymore and I wasn’t getting anything out of the classes that was going to help me the way I needed help. So I just thought, “You know what? Fuck all of this,” you know, I just thought, “my mom’s gone, my dad talks to walls now, my sister’s in Oregon. I can’t take this. I can’t take all of this shit.” I try to explain how hard I wanted to let myself go, for the first time to give myself the chance to not care so much about trying to be good, about trying to save my father, but I didn’t give up the right way, so my mind just kind of burst, just caved in and now I’m here and feeling crazy and worried and so goddamn lost that I don’t know what I’m supposed to be thinking or doing. And I don’t trust anything I’m saying and I’m ashamed saying this to my Uncle so I look straight out the window when I’m talking, focusing hard on the fir trees turning gray in the rain.

“That’s hard,” my uncle says after some time, “that’s really, really, really, really hard,” and that’s all I can hear. He says some other things, but I’m still stuck out there on the other side of the windowpane tangled up in fir trees branches, sucking up raindrops, wishing that I hadn’t said anything.

When he gets up to leave, I pick up the classifieds lying on the ground and point to the ad I’d circled with one of Grace’s red crayons. “Adventure Jobs,” it reads, “open to youth ages 16-19. 12 weeks working for the Oregon Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. $3,000 if term completed. Apply online,” and then it gives an email address and a phone number.

My Uncle shrugs. “Do that,” he says looking sad, “you really gotta do something, Tony. I’m going to bed now, so goodnight. I love you.” He pats me on the shoulder and scratches his head and walks out of the room.

I nod and I’m still looking at the fir trees and the rain, still dreaming up ways to break through glass.

* * * *

Two weeks later my uncle, my aunt, my cousins, and my sister all drop me off at a clump of old school buildings on the side of a highway in a green residential area. “Be safe out there,” my aunt says looking serious. “Don’t do anything stupid,” my sister says looking worried. “You’ll be alright,” my uncle says looking sad and then everyone hugs me. And when I get out of the car with my big black duffle bag slung over my shoulder, Grace and Emma are singing, “Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, byeeee,” and I stick out my tongue and make my eyes big and crazy and they’re giggling with their heads out the windows when the car pulls away.

I wander around, looking into windows, trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be, worried that because I’m late, I’ll get fired before I even start working. But I finally stumble into a dark auditorium with a concrete floor lined with brown fold-out chairs and there’s a couple of hippies and a couple of rednecks all wearing matching green thermal vests pointing to maps of Oregon forests, reading out rules and mailing addresses, smiling at the people in chairs. And most of the chairs are filled with families, with tired women in oversized Disneyland sweatshirts, with silent Mexican men with buttoned up Sunday shirts and slicked back hair and silent white men with brown beards and canvas jackets. And there are lot of little children with too big eyes and a couple women with wild eyes wearing crystals around their necks. There are even a few babies, some silent, some screaming, and they’re the kids of some of the kids who are soon to be laborers in the woods, the kids pretending that they are not listening to anything these hippies and rednecks are saying.

And these kids, these “youth ages 16-19,” are a wonderful and terrible mess. They are the home-schooled-church kids, the kicked-out-of-school kids, the state-property-youth-authority kids, the reservation kids, the commune-fried-hippie-kids, the immigrant kids, the country-boy-spitting-tobacco-into-Styrofoam-cups-killing-time-before-they-get-shipped-off-to-Iraq kids, the junky kids. But these titles overlap and blend together and all of us are here because there is no other place for us to go right now, we’ve all fallen into this somehow together.

And the talk ends and soon someone reads off my name from a sheet - “Maholovich, Anthony” – and I’m given a red hard hat and I’m put into a group with 12 other kids and it’s a blur of explanations and descriptions. We move back and forth from one area of the old school to the other and they tell us how to use the Dutch ovens made of iron and the tiny whisper light stoves, how to build up and take down the big white rubber tents that we sleep in every night, all 8 boys in my crew, cramped and on top of each other. They show us the tools we will use to make hiking trails and bridges and check-steps and aqueducts – the shovels and hoes and grubbers, the pick-axes and rock bars that are all long steel. They show us the engines of the old school buses that they converted to run on fuel they make in their garden from castor bean oil. And finally our boss Mary introduces herself with a real smile and she tells us jokes about pirates. And we’re all in the bus, packed with food and tools and fuel, and it hasn’t even been three hours since I got there and we’re already driving deep into the woods.

* * * *

The first six days I smoke weed in the mornings, in the afternoons, at night with a kid named Lamar and a girl named Kiki, both of them from Portland, both fatherless and cynical and smart. Lamar has a shaved head and a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe running down his arm and Kiki tells me she was whored for drugs at nine, her left nipple sliced off at eleven when she lived in a shack outside La Pine with no electricity, no bed, no heat. She tells me this when we pass this broken place on the drive to this first work site and when I try to squeeze her hand she slaps it hard.

“You think you pity me?” she spits, “I’ll kick your ass if you pity me.”

And I don’t say anything else. I just chew up the amphetamines that Lamar feeds me, Adderall pills, and I’m talking, talking, talking, trying to get all these people to like me, but already it’s not working. And it’s on a Thursday afternoon after work when I’m alone in the big white rubber tent and sweating and exhausted that I look at my hands. And they are my hands, not my father’s, not my mother’s, and I’m doing this to myself, I’m doing this to myself all over again, and finally I fall to my knees.

* * * *

We wake up before the sun rises to work and the sleeping bags are always wet with dew and I strip down to my underwear quickly and throw my long johns in a dirty stuff sack and pull on my blue button-up shirt that’s always stiff in the morning with salt sweat and then my blue jeans and my gloves that are always still wet from the rain and my boots that are always wet too. You can see your breath those mornings and there’s oatmeal with globs of peanut butter and brown sugar and sometimes powdered-milk with frosted corn flakes and maybe some hot water and a packet of Army issued cocoa.

We work and work and work and I throw my whole self into it. I surrender to it. I haul rocks and logs and clear trails and prune tree branches and rewire barbed steel on ranch fences and push wheelbarrows full of earth farther and farther into the forest. And I cook and I clean and sharpen tools and learn to tie strong knots, to read sky patterns and animal tracks and contour maps and stars. And we all work until sundown and when I wake up I’m not sweating anymore as the sun moves between the fir trees and then over and beyond a lake or a mountain or a bird and I start to watch it now without shaking.

Sometimes I climb trees in the evenings, taking in the view and letting the branches hold me in place. Later on we scale hills and then mountains on our hikes to the next worksite, crossing streams, and I collect stones and rocks and acorns along the way. I gather bits and pieces of flowers and weeds and berries and carry them all together in my backpack. And I chew on mint stems and clovers, wild mustard leaves and dandelions.

And I start to face the pain, to work away at it, bringing it back forward again, using shovels and axes and rock bars to expose the maggots and termites scrambling around inside the rotted logs that laugh at you when you cut them open. And sometimes at night the forest opens up and the vision comes back and I have to bite my black fingernails and stick the bits of nail between the skinny gaps in my front teeth and slide those bits back and forth with my tongue. I try to reflect, look inside, and when I do this I see floating faces, floating smiles, floating stars, unblinking eyes. And I look at my hands and they are paws, all lumps and yellow calluses and grey dirt, and my fingernails are broken claws and my head is snakes and my beard is a patch of black moss.

I’d need silence then, a soft quiet, and I’d crawl into my sleeping bag, ripping off my jeans and my socks black with dirt, my underwear, and I’d lie naked and spread myself out and listen for a while and then talk to some of the guys in the tent about being at the bottom of society, stuck in a group of criminals and outcasts, and we’d all laugh at this because that’s who we were. And then I’d dream real dreams about padded cells and castles and green hills that just kept rolling on and on and always towards my mother.

And there are some lines you can cross that you can’t step back over. But I kept working and the woods kept me safe then and I held onto the dirt and grass and branches so tight that I stopped falling off this world.

And we all come from the earth and go back to it, but I went back early, led there without knowing why. I guess I needed to touch the questions with my hands, feel them with my fingers. Was it stardust or swamp mud or dinosaur shit or pure light or everything and everything and still more? A flow of moments was what I broke it down into. Be here, hold on, work, it will come. Don’t run away.

And I found the quiet places – a warm breeze, a soft pillow made of a wool sweater and leaves, a full moon, green shoelaces, a slow creek. And I keep finding more.

* * * *

My father’s letters came every two weeks, on Saturdays, the re-supply days, the days we return back to the old school buildings in Eugene for a day and a night to get more food and fuel. Usually there’d be a dozen or so, each of them sealed tight with scotch tape, my name and the P.0. Box number and address typed clear and firm on the front, printed out from his computer. Every letter tells me that he loves me in neat blue pen on yellow legal paper and every letter tells me how many days he’s gone without a drink or a cigarette – 34, 65, 87. I go into the tent to read them and usually I fall asleep when I’m finished and I’m woken up by Mary ringing a cowbell that calls everyone to a row of long picnic tables in the back of an old gymnasium. And the food is always hot and afterwards people kick around a hackysack or play cards or sit around a fire and tell each other stories while other people play banjos and harmonicas and guitars.

At the beginning of these re-supply days we do our laundry and while our clothes are spinning, we pay a dollar to take showers at the YMCA, washing off all the dirt and the leaves and flowers that have become a part of our skin and our hair. And this YMCA is close to my sister’s high school and I always shower fast so I can meet her for an hour in her school’s cafeteria. And my sister tells me about the books she’s reading, about her job at Blockbuster, about my Uncle John and Jamie and Grace and Emma, about the concerts she’s been going to. And I can listen now when she tells me these things.