The smell of the fields blows up against the screen and spreads its sweet tonnage over him. Running after something is about as happy as things get in this place. There is always, as Ralph had pointed out, some of that. Even if it is only stew beans and a chunk of hard cornbread. He knew from the first that they were done for. It is like a disease, like polio or a sudden cancer that you don’t know when it is going to catch you but you know it will, like the red dog. One day you wake up with it sitting like a fat ugly dog on your chest. Yet even in the dark of that first night in Klaudio with Little Buster crying and Rollie Gregory moaning from where they had beat him across the backs of his legs with a plowline and some of the others making hurt noises in their sleep — night (you could tell) in the black room because they had shoved what they thought was supper (cold peas and cornbread) in to them — he felt something crank down in him, some new figuration of time that he sank into, and after the first scarifying moments when he thrashed, fighting the suffocation of it, he relaxed and began to breathe.
It was like breathing air without time in it.
