They drive back the way they came, passing through the flat fields of sugarcane, the leaves and stalks flashing along the periphery of Lane’s vision, through the vast black sea of the prairie, through the Atchafalaya swampland, where the great-kneed cypress and tupelo rise from the water around them, dark shapes against the dark sky. This time, Seward drives; Lane sits in the passenger seat, cuffs around his wrists and shackles around his legs. He watches as the truck weaves from one side of the road to the other, steered by the captain’s unsteady hand. Lane doesn’t care. He doesn’t care if Seward runs the truck off the road, if it kills him. His eyes are heavy, and he lets himself drift into and out of sleep, his head snapping upright just as his chin has landed on his chest. Images float by like dreams: a wheat field, the waitress, snakes and wires, the dog he’d had as a kid. He drifts, wondering whether this is what it’s like to die.
A change in the truck’s momentum brings him back to the present moment, and he sits upright as the captain makes the hard turn off the state highway onto the gravel road that leads down to the Angola ferry. The sky has started to fade from black to blue, the world to reappear; Lane can see into the boggy land around them, the forest rising from the wetland. The black shapes of trees take on detail as the sky behind them grows lighter, and the neon film of pollen on the surface of the water glows.
Finally the road deposits them on the banks of the Mississippi, where the ferry is waiting, tailgate lowered and ready to accept the load it sent forth nearly twenty-four hours ago. The crew greets them wordlessly, goes about the solemn work of tying, untying, pushing off, and starting out over the swirling brown water toward the east, where Angola waits. The ferry makes its way across the river, and with it the truck and the chair and the five men, three outside the truck and two within, all of them watching as the sun crests the horizon and the undersides of the clouds begin to smolder.