Reincarnations

"Fire up the dozer," the deputy said. "Let’s bury ‘em and get on back to town. We done us a good night’s work here, by God."

Somebody climbed up onto the bulldozer’s seat. The big yellow Caterpillar D-4 belched and farted to life. It bit out a great chunk of dirt and, motor growling, poured it over the two Black Muslims and Cecil Price. Price struggled hopelessly to breathe. More dirt thudded down on him, more and more.

Buried alive! he thought. Sweet Jesus help me, I’m buried alive! But not for long. The last thing he knew was the taste of earth filling his mouth.

He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth seemed to fill his mouth.

He sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, heart sledgehammering in his chest as if he’d run a hundred miles. He looked around wildly. Tiny stripes of pale moonlight slipped between the slats of the Venetian blinds and stretched across the bedroom floor.

Beside him on the cheap, lumpy mattress, someone stirred: his wife. "You all right, Cecil?" she muttered drowsily.

A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. Was he all right? That was a different question, a harder question. "I guess… I guess maybe I am," he said, wonder in his voice.

"Then settle down and go on back to sleep. I aim to, if you give me half a chance," his wife said. "What ails you, anyhow?"

"Bad dream," he answered, the way he always did. He’d never said a word about what kind of bad dream it was. Somehow, he didn’t think he could say a word about what kind of bad dream it was. He’d tried two or three times, always with exactly zero luck. The words wouldn’t form. The ideas behind the words wouldn’t form, not so he could talk about them. But even if he couldn’t, he knew what the dreams were all about. Oh, yes. He knew.

He still lived in the same brown clapboard house he’d lived in on that hot summer night in 1964, the brown clapboard house he’d lived in for going on forty years. It wasn’t more than a block away from Philadelphia’s town square.

He’d been Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price then. He ran for sheriff in ‘67, when Larry Rainey didn’t go for another term, but another Klansman beat him out. Then he spent four years away, and after that he couldn’t very well be a lawman any more. Once he came back to Mississippi, he worked as a surveyor. He drove a truck for an oil company. And he wound up a jeweler and watchmaker-he’d always been good with his hands. He turned into a big wheel among Mississippi Shriners.

But the dreams never went away. If he hadn’t seen that damn Ford station wagon that afternoon… He had, though, and what happened next followed as inexorably as night followed day. Two Yankee busybodies: Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. One uppity local nigger: James Chaney.

At the time, getting rid of them seemed the only sensible thing to do. He took care of it, with plenty of help from the Ku Klux Klan.

He wondered if the others, the ones who were still alive, had dreams like his. He’d tried to ask a couple of times, but he couldn’t, any more than he could talk about his own. Maybe they’d tried to ask him, too. If they had, they hadn’t had any luck, either.

Dreams. His started even before the damn informer tipped off the FBI about where the bodies were buried. At first, he figured they were just nerves. Who wouldn’t have a case of the jitters after what he went through, when the whole country was trying to pull Neshoba County down around his ears?

Well, the whole country damn well did it. Back in June 1964, who would have dreamt a Mississippi jury- -a jury of Mississippi white men-would, could, convict anybody for violating the civil rights of a coon and a couple of Jews? But the jury damn well did that, too. Price got six years, and served four of them in a Federal prison in Mi

He went on having the dreams up there.

Sometimes weeks went by when they let him alone, and he would wonder if he was free. And he would always hope he was, and he never would be. It was as if hoping he were free was enough all by itself for… something to show him he wasn’t.

Did the dreams make him change? Did they just make him pretend to change? Even he couldn’t say for sure. Ten years after he got convicted, he told a reporter-a New York City reporter, no less-he’d seen Roots and liked it. When he talked about integration, he said that was how things were going to be and that was all there was to it.

He spent years rebuilding his name, rebuilding his reputation. And then, in 1999, everything fell to pieces again. He got convicted of another felony. No guns this time, no cars racing down the highway in the heat of the night: he sold certifications for commercial driver’s licensing without doing the testing he should have. A cheap little money-making scheme-except he got caught.

They didn’t jug him that time. He drew three years’ probation. But you could stay a hero-to some people-for doing what you thought you had to do to people who were trying to change the way of life you’d known since you were born. When you got busted for selling bogus certifications, you weren’t a hero to anybody, even yourself. You were just a lousy little crook.

A lousy little crook with… dreams.

Two years later, a season after the turn of the century, he climbed up on a lift at an equipment-rental place in Philadelphia. He fell off somehow, and landed on his head. He died three days later at a hospital in Jackson-the same hospital where he’d brought the bodies of Schwerner and Goodman and Chaney for autopsy thirty-seven years earlier, after the FBI tore up the dam to get them out. He never knew that, but then, neither had they.

He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.

THEY'D NEVER -

This one is Esther Friesner’s fault. No one-and I mean no one-else could have come up with an anthology called Alien Pregnant by Elvis. Mashing tabloid reality, real reality (if there is such a thing), and science fiction together should be illegal. For all I know, it is. Nobody’s busted me for it. Yet.

Mort Pfeiffer slung his jacket over the back of his chair, then plomped his ample bottom into said chair and turned on his computer. Another day, he thought gloomily. He looked around the office of the Weekly Intelligencer.

It looked like a newspaper office: other people dressed no better than he was sat around in front of screens and clicked away at keyboards. Those clicks made it sound like a newspaper office, too. It even smelled like a newspaper office: stale coffee and musty air conditioning with two settings, too hot and too cold.

But it wasn’t a newspaper office, or not exactly. If the Intelligencer wasn’t the trashiest supermarket and 7-Eleven rack filler around, the troops hadn’t done their job for the week. "For this I went to journalism school?" Mort muttered.

He wished for a cigarette. The smoke would have made the place smell even more authentic. But the Intelligencer office had gone smoke-free a couple of years before-it was either that or lose their health insurance. Besides, he was wearing a transdermal nicotine patch. Smoke while you had one of those things stuck to you and you were a coronary waiting to happen.

Behind glasses that were going to turn into bifocals the next time he got around to seeing his optometrist, his eyes lit up for a moment. Transdermal patches… he might be able to do something with that. They were hot these days, and no more than three percent of the lip-movers who bought the Intelligencer were likely to have even a clue about what transdermal meant.

So… the begi