Dark Horse

by Doug Richardson

  “That’s awful kind of you, Mr. McCann,” said Hollice. “But like I told you, I just write ‘em the way I see ‘em.”

  “You write ‘em. The voters read ‘em. And I’ll ride ‘em all the way to D.C. Yeeeha!” whooped Shakespeare, behaving as the preeminent uncandidate.

  “Speaking of writing them, Mr. McCann.”

  “Call me, Shakes, Hollice.”

  “How about that interview? I’m sure there’s a lot more the public wants to know about you.” There. He’d done it. He’d put Shakes on the spot.

  “Sure thing. Lemme get back to some more callers and we’ll hook up after the show.”

  Sure enough, after the radio program, Shakespeare called Hollice. Gone was the pitchman candidate at the bully pulpit. Shakes was short and to the point. “Good job on the New Orleans piece. But I didn’t see any follow-up articles.”

  “Paper’s on the auction block.”

  “Really. Who’s buyin’?”

  “Vidor Kingman.”

  “That a fact?”

  “Solid gold. And my boss wants to play an even hand so he can keep his job,” said Hollice. “Now, what about my interview?”

  “I’ll call later with the time and place.” Shakespeare hung up before Hollice could respond.

  TWO

  THE TIME and place were set for the evening of September 14. A Saturday. The address was little more than a rural route number down in Gilroy, south of town and just about halfway to Mexico.

  Hollice, a man encumbered with the world’s worst sense of direction, and who sometimes got lost in the Daily Mirror offices, followed the map to Gilroy. From there he had to wait by a Shell station pay phone until Shakespeare called with the rest of the directions. But without the aid of street signs or a local map, he found himself stopping barefoot boys and dusty derelicts, asking directions. No help, though. Hollice showed up nearly an hour late for the interview.

  When he finally pulled down the two-and-a-half-mile dirt drive, the sun had set and twilight was looming beyond the two huge pepper trees that hung over a threeroom ranch house with a twenty-five-watt bulb for a porch light.

  Odd, he thought. Yes, this was the interview. But here? It wasn’t even in the congressional district. Gravel crunched under his feet as he crawled from the car and turned up the stone walk that led to the front door. There was no doorbell, so he knocked. A voice called out from inside—Shakespeare’s—giving the go-ahead to come on in. Hollice turned the knob and entered to a dim interior straight out of some postwar ad in the Saturday Evening Post. Furniture. Pictures on the wall. A woven rag rug. Most everything was covered by a thin layer of dust, the only exception being a Naugahyde sofa and a hoop-backed kitchen chair set nearby. To the side were piled threadbare sheets, which Hollice thought must’ve been covering this furniture for years upon untouched years.

  Shakespeare appeared from the kitchen with a six-pack dripping wet from a Coleman cooler. “Cold one?” He tossed a can to Hollice before hearing an answer. “Fridge’s been broke since sixty-four.”

  “I’m late. I’m sorry,” said Hollice. “This is a ways out.”

  “Come here to think.”

  “Looks like it’s been a while since then.”

  Shakespeare laughed. “Guess so. Have a seat. Couch is pretty comfy for an old beater.” He took his seat in the old hoop chair, his skinny tailbone sliding forward and that sixer of beer dangling from one hand. “So let’s get this started. I’m only good for as long as the beer holds out.”

  “How much beer you got?”

  “Well, you were late. I already downed two. The one in your hand makes three. And I’m starting number four,” sounded off Shakespeare, looking all too relaxed in a T-shirt and Wrangler blue jeans. “Subtract that from the case in the cooler, that’d leave us just about twenty.”

  “Sounds like a good start,” said Hollice, trying to sound upbeat, but still unnerved by the lousy lighting. “What you got for power out here?”

  “Got me a genny in the basement and gas enough to fuel the Indy Five Hundred.”

  “So why don’t we get on with it?”

  “This is your interview, friend. You got a question?”

  Hollice had a question, all right. He had a list compiled from months of notations. Yet he started with what was on his mind.

  “Whose house is this? Yours?”

  “Yup,” said Shakespeare with that single-syllable attitude.

  Hollice challenged, “You buy it? How long ago? Feel free to fill in the blanks.”

  “My mother’s house. She left it to me.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Long time ago. Must be twenty years now.”

  “Did you live here?”

  “No. Never even saw the place until after she died. A friend of hers tracked me down and said there was some property I’d inherited. Turned out to be my mother’s. Hadn’t seen the woman since I was five years old.”

  “So you were abandoned?”

  “By my mother? Well, I never looked at it that way, but if we were putting it in today’s language—sure. She abandoned me and him.”

  “Him?”

  “My old man. He’s the one that raised me. Never talked about her, though. My whole life, she was just a bad memory.” Shakespeare’s beer was empty. In a practiced, single-handed move, one can was discarded and another was popped with a carbonated hiss.

  “Nineteen,” he reminded Hollice.

  Hollice remembered he’d forgotten to start his tape recorder. A dead giveaway that the reporter was more nerves than cool. Quickly, from inside his jacket pocket, he withdrew his microcassette recorder and placed it on the arm of the couch, switching it on.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I was going to tape this.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “My memory is a sieve,” said Hollice.

  “I thought you was a Luddite. Hated machines.”

  “It’s my only true surrender to technology. Can’t do an interview without it.”

  “Makes me wonder what reporters ever did without tape.”

  “They wrote shorthand.”

  “Good enough. But no tape.”

  “No tape, no interview.”

  “Suit yourself.” Shakespeare crossed his arms. “Don’t let the door hit you in the caboose.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I thought we’d keep this casual.”

  “You said full disclosure.”

  “Yup. But I didn’t say anything about tape. So you can stay and ask your questions or we can call it a date.” Shakespeare waited. “Shame. You drove all the way down here, too.”

  After sitting on the horns of his dilemma for a good minute, Hollice pocketed the running tape player, replacing it with a pad and pen.

  “Where were you born?”

  “Texas. Atherton.”

  “Is there a birth record?”

  “Somewhere. Must be,” laughed Shakespeare. “I’m here, ain’t I? But hell if I can find it.”

  “And you say your mother left when you were five. Then what?”

  “My old man, he didn’t like to stay in one place too long. Used to say, if it don’t fit in the trunk of your car, you don’t own it.”

  “So you traveled?”

  “Here and there. The Midwest. Southeast. Florida some. Wherever there was a mark and his money.”

  Mark and his money?

  Had Hollice heard right? “Your father was a con man?”

  “Not just a con man. He was the original Grift Master.” Then Shakespeare laughed. “If he hadn’t been so addicted to cards and booze, I’da grown up rich.”

  “So on the record. Your old man was a con man.”

  “Oh, yeah. Kinda poetic, bein’ that I’m just now gettin’ into politics, don’tcha think?”

  “And you’re not worried about the voters finding out? Making associations?”

  “Why would I? At this point it gives me a colorful upbringing. Tell me, what
great Texan didn’t have a colorful life? Didn’t ol’ Hurricane Hammond have a momma who used to whore in the gamblin’-boat days of Cathedral?”

  “Yes. But it was something he always denied.”

  “Well, we’re nearing the millennium. Time we all fessed up. Vote ourselves an honest politician. My daddy was a con man. What else you wanna know?”

  “Con men are users. Oftentimes they use their kids. Were you involved in some of his schemes?”

  “Are you asking if I know the difference between the Jamaican hustle and a common pigeon scheme? Hell yes. Did I ever run ‘em myself? Well, I was just a kid. I liked my daddy. Wanted him to love me. Liked to help him out. What kid wouldn’t?”

  “Did you know what you were doing was wrong?”

  “Knew it was the devil’s work. But my daddy was a devilish kinda fellah.”

  Hollice was floored. A thrill shot through his body. He gathered himself, trying hard not to write the story in his head during the interview. He knew he should just keep asking questions and writing answers. Sift and collate later.

  “When did your father die?”

  “When I was ten. We were in Florida and I had nobody. Didn’t know where my mother was. So I got by on the street runnin’ a three-card monty table and gettin’ chased by the local cops.”

  “Ever get caught?”

  “Yup.”

  “How many times?”

  “Time enough to get me an education. If it weren’t for foster parents and boys’ farms, I don’t think I’d have gotten any kind of learnin’. Books was always good. Books taught me a lot. But when a kid hits the streets after a turn or two in some kind of institution, he goes back to what he’s got. Fifteen-year-old boy can’t learn to make a wage in work camp. But if he’s got a girl he’s sweet on and wants to buy her some flowers, a quick-change artist can buy those flowers and still have money left over for an egg cream.”

  “You used to make quick change?”

  “What do you think the Fed does? Interests rates go up and down all the time. It’s the same game. What we need is a politician that can see through all them Ponzi schemes Uncle Sam plays on us every day.”

  “Let’s go back. Whatever happened to that girlfriend?”

  Without much prodding, the strange man launched into a torrid tale of his first love. A sixteen-year-old named Charlotte from Gainesville, Florida. Without a roof over his head or a dollar in his pocket, he swindled her old man out of pocket change for dates with nothing more than a smile on his face and a borrowed cadet’s uniform from the local military academy. The girl’s father finally caught on to the scheme, phoned the local PD, and had Shakespeare locked up just to keep the two teenagers apart long enough for their hormones to cool.

  “Poor old boy didn’t know we’d already done the dirty deed in the back of his pickup truck,” recalled Shakespeare.

  Hollice put his pencil down. He’d been there nearly an hour, but felt the need for a reality check. “Two beers. That’s all you’ve had?”

  “Four. Plus this one. You haven’t been listening.”

  “Get straight with me here. What’s your angle with this?”

  “Ain’t figured it out yet, have ya?” teased Shakespeare, sounding offhanded.

  “You realize what my headline is? ‘Candidate McCann is Former Con Man.’ Dutton could sink you with it.”

  “I’ll make it plain. I’m out to show that politics is all one big con. Short cons. Long cons. Dutton’s campaign! Now, that’s a con. So was Hammond’s. Who better to bust open the rotten melon but the farmer who grew it?”

  “Sounds like the George Washington cherry tree theory of truth and consequences.”

  “You can get away with anything as long as you tell someone about it,” laughed Shakespeare. “Well, I’m tellin’ you. What you do with it, well, that’s for us to talk about later on.”

  “How about now?”

  “Your interview. My life. What’s next?”

  “Okay. Fine. So your true campaign game is truth or dare?”

  “I’m runnin’ up even with Dutton. The voters are now expecting to see a lot of politics as usual. Punch, counterpunch. Attack ads. Negative, negative, negative,” said Shakespeare. “I’m sayin’ this is where the tracks split. So I aim to give the voters the real thing. Turn it all upside down. Be the first candidate to be elected on the truth of the matter. Full disclosure. I’ll wear my life like a badge of honor. The public’ll love it.” Then with a subtle wink, “And I expect, so will you.”

  “You think so?” challenged Hollice.

  “Look around. We both see the same thing. We got us some convicted killers who got higher polling figures than the president himself. Why? Cuz they call it as they see it, with nothing to hide. Everything they got to say is golden. Public is perched on their every word. They’re craving the real deal. I’m here to fill the bill. And one day you’re gonna write about it.”

  “Try tomorrow.”

  “Let’s stick with today.”

  Sweat dripped down Hollice’s thick legs. He wasn’t hearing one story. It was much bigger. In five parts with a Sunday sum-up.

  Thank God for the tape.

  “You’re either crazy or smarter than the rest of us,” said Hollice.

  “You gotta wait for the end of the movie to find out,” reminded Shakespeare.

  The empty beer cans were slowly stacked in a neat pyramid next to McCann’s chair. And with each dead soldier came another story of a scam run by the young Shakespeare McCann. How he’d worked boiler-room operations, selling miracle vitamins or bogus vacation schemes. Summers, he’d work the deep South, hustling personally embossed Bibles. Only the Bibles would never arrive.

  “And you can document all of this?” worried Hollice, who’d had a few beers of his own by now.

  “I could. But I won’t. I’d done all this under so many damned assumed names, Social Security numbers, it’d be near impossible to figure. I don’t remember most of ‘em myself. Bill Hodges is one. Carlton McGrew was ‘nother. My old man used to say, the crazier the name, the more likely a fellah was to believe it.”

  “How about Shakespeare McCann? Is that your actual name?”

  “Good question. Wondered it myself from time to time. My mother’s maiden name was Neville. There’s a record of that. And she married William McCann. But whether that was my old man’s actual name or some phony is a mystery.”

  “And you say there’s no birth certificate?”

  “Like I said before. Ain’t one. Dare you to find it. I’ve looked. Tore this house apart once, lookin’ for some kind of record.”

  “There has to be something. School records?”

  “Sure there is. But by the time I was in school, we’d moved on and I’d have a new name in every town. I remember I was a Mike Burdsall somewhere in Indiana around the fifth grade. I hated that name. Everybody always called me Birdy on account that I was so skinny.” Shakespeare swilled the last of another beer and added the empty to the stack. “‘Nother?”

  “No, thanks. Let’s get back to this birth certificate. I thought the rules to run for office required proof of identity. Including a birth certificate.”

  “You forget. I was in the print shop business.”

  “You forged your birth certificate?”

  “Didn’t see any harm in it. I was born Shakespeare McCann. That much, I know.” Shakespeare spoke this time with undue emphasis. “Should I be denied a chance at public service because my daddy was a con man and my momma a no-good whore?”

  “Well, no. I don’t think—” stammered Hollice. “It’s just that you could be anybody. You could make up any story.”

  “You think I’m makin’ this up?”

  “Well, no…”

  “But you want proof, anyway?”

  “It would put it all in a context I might understand better. Without documentation…”

  Nobody would believe the story.

  “If I can’t corroborate, I can’t print,” said H
ollice.

  “That ain’t my problem, is it?”

  “Shit! Nobody will believe this!”

  “I don’t care about anybody else.”

  “Excuse me?” asked Hollice.

  “I only care that you believe it.”

  “What do you care what I believe?”

  “Scenario one,” began Shakespeare. “I get elected. I’m going to need a chief of staff. You’re candidate number one.”

  If Hollice was in the dark, it was all getting blacker. Shakespeare had shifted gears sideways. If that was at all possible. “Are you offering me a job?”

  “It’s not an offer.”

  “I can still say no.”

  “Scenario number two. I get elected. And Vidor Kingman buys your newspaper. I guarantee you, he’ll be all over me just like he was all over ol’ Hurricane. I ask a favor. You get the shaft. End of story.”

  “Scenario three. Dutton gets elected.”

  “He won’t get elected,” said Shakespeare cryptically.

  “So this is a threat,” confirmed Hollice.

  “It’s an opportunity,” said Shakespeare, his voice dropping an octave while that patented twang dimished, the tone barely distinguishable from the average Yankee. “Look at you. You’ve spent your life printing other people’s bullshit. Sure, every once in a while maybe you get to tell it the way it is. But deep down, you know that you’re nothing more than the local publicity hack, willing to print just about anything the local whosits say just so you can fill in a six-inch column that pays your rent.”

  How the fuck would you know?

  That was the next question. One Hollice dared not ask.

  Shakespeare continued, “I bet you’ve sent your stuff just about everywhere. Washington Post. New York Times. Chicago Tribune—”

  “And what if I have?”

  “Well, you’re still here. That says it all, I think.”

  “Maybe I like it here.”

  “Chief of staff job. Onetime offer. Washington, D.C. Think of the connections you’ll make. It’s not too late to win that Pulitzer.”