"You see?" the black deputy said. "Hard or easy. That there was pretty goddamn easy, wasn’t it?"
The BKV men who had hold of Muhammad Shabazz dragged him forward. Even as they did, he was trying to talk sense to them. "I understand how you feel, but this won’t help you," he said in a calm, reasonable voice. "Killing us won’t do anything for your cause. You-"
"Shut up, asshole." Wayne Roberts cuffed him across the face. "You bet this’ll do us some good. We’ll be rid of you, won’t we? Good riddance to bad rubbish." He shot Muhammad Shabazz the same way he’d killed the other Black Muslim.
"Easy as can be," the deputy sheriff said. "Easier’n he deserved, I reckon. Fucker never knew what hit him." The hot, wet air was thick with the stinks of smokeless powder, of blood, of shit, of fear, of rage.
Easy or not, Cecil Price didn’t want to die. With a sudden shout that even startled him, he broke loose from the men who had hold of him. Shouting-screaming-he ran like a madman down Rock Cut Road.
He didn’t get more than forty or fifty feet before the first bullet slammed into his back. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his face, dirt in his mouth, more dirt in his nose. Something horrible was happening inside him. He felt on fire, only worse. When he tried to get up, he couldn’t.
Big as a mountain, hard as a mountain, the deputy sheriff loomed over him. "All right, white boy," he ground out. "You coulda had it easy, same as your asshole buddies. Now we’re gonna do it the hard way." He crouched down beside Price, grabbed his right arm, and broke it over his thigh like a broomstick. The sound the bones made when they snapped was just about like a breaking broomstick, too. The sound Cecil Price made… How the BKV men laughed!
With a grunt, the sheriff got to his feet. With the arrogant strut he always used, he walked around to Price’s left side. With the coldblooded deliberation he’d shown before, he broke the white man’s left arm. Price barely had room inside his head for any new torment.
Or so he thought, till one of the Black Knights of Voodoo kicked him in the crotch. "Ain’t gonna mess with no black women now, are you, buckra?" he jeered. More boots thudded into Price’s balls. That almost made him forget about his ruined arms. It almost made him forget about the bullet in his back, except he couldn’t find breath enough to scream the way he wanted to.
After an eternity that probably lasted three or four minutes, the deputy sheriff said, "Reckon that’s enough now. Let’s finish him off and get rid of the bodies."
"I’ll take care of it. Bet your sweet ass I will," Wayne Roberts said. He fired at Price again, and then again. Another gun barked, too, maybe once, maybe twice. By that time, Price had stopped paying close attention.
But he didn’t fall straight into sweet blackness, the way Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid had. He lingered in red torment when the BKV men picked him up and stuffed him into the trunk of one of their cars along with the Black Muslims’ bodies.
The car jounced down the dirt road, every pothole and every rock a fresh stab of agony. At last, it stopped. "Here we go," somebody said as a Black Knight of Voodoo opened the trunk. "This ought to do the job."
"Oh, fuck, yes," somebody else said. Eager gloved hands hauled Cecil Price out of the trunk, and then the corpses of his friends.
"Hell, this dam’ll hold a hundred of them." That was the deputy sheriff, sounding in charge of things as usual. "Go on, throw ‘em in there, and we’ll cover ‘em up. Nobody’ll ever find the sons of bitches."
Thump! That was one of the Black Muslims, going into a hollow in the ground. Thump! That was the other one. And thump! That was Cecil Price, landing on top of Tariq Abdul-Rashid and Muhammad Shabazz. An Everest of pain in what were already the Himalayas.
"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 Minnesota before they turned him loose for good behavior.
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.