Bam! it went, bam! in his head like a pile driver sinking cypress logs into heavy Aufuskie bay mud for the new highway bridge, the actual driver and the other in his head almost the same but not quite — this other bam! that went on in his head some days until it seemed anchored not in memory but in his soul, bam! of doors closing and days ending and of time itself like a heavy hammer banging down hard on his head. He lay dreaming on his bunk in Acheron State Prison infirmary, bunk you could call it that was nothing but a few sticks of cypress wood bound together with grass rope and covered with a pile of cotton matting that he lay on, sick, the doctor said, with malaria — ague, cold plague — the red dog, they called it in the barracks — lying on his back with a headache like the sound of those pile drivers, the ones inside his head and the ones outside, lay thinking of the cold black waters of the river he had escaped into last winter and gotten maybe two chilled miles farther down before he was fished out with a mullet net by the sheriff of Alderson county, cast naked onto the raw bank and beaten across the back with a rope until he couldn’t get to his feet when ordered to. He lay dreaming of the white piano in the Emporium his mother used to nod off to in the big red parlor after a long night’s work, and slept for forty hours in the grassrope bunk, waking only to sip a little water from the tin cup Milo had placed beside his bed. Dreaming of the big snake that had lived with him and the mosquitoes that bit him and the deer flies stabbing his chest and tiny gnats settling into his ears and supping at the corners of his eyes, making themselves at home, but even in the dream he did not mind any of these creatures because he was dreaming of a white bed in a big house that opened along one side onto an airport where planes with big round propellors landed and took off and sailed away with him riding in the forward cockpit in a shiny leather helmet and a yellow silk scarf that trailed behind like a running streak engraved on the blue sky, flying to the sound of piano music.

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