Dark Horse

by Doug Richardson

“Okay,” he began ever so slowly. “She picked him because he’s got some dough. But. She’s afraid that sixty words per minute won’t get her the Cadillac she’s always dreamed of.”

  “And?”

  “And…she loves him. You can tell by the way he smiles back at her. Comfortable.”

  “But…”

  “When he gets up to go to work, her best friend’s her vibrator.”

  Rene howled and clapped her hands. “You got it.”

  “I made it up.”

  “It’s just a game, Mitch.”

  “Okay. Your turn,” he said, seeking out her next target. “The guy with the bad hairpiece. Sweater vest. Under the painting. See him?”

  “Easy. Tries hard. Comes too fast. Entertains the kids by making balloon animals out of condoms.”

  They laughed some more. It was a cruel game. But it made Mitch feel connected to someone in a way he hadn’t in months. It had nothing to do with anything, he told himself. It was just a bit of twisted fun, plain and simple.

  “My turn,” said Rene. “Back in the dark corner. She’s got her hair pulled back. The one with the scarf, see her?”

  “Got it,” he said, zeroing in on the unsuspecting wife. “Miss Proper Yuppie. She’s good off the gun, but gets bored quickly. Afraid blow jobs might spoil her makeup. And twice in one night—”

  “Oh, out of the question!” agreed Rene, giggling over her appetizer.

  They were laughing so hard, when the maître d’ appeared, he thought the joke might be on him. “Excuse me, signor. Mrs. Dutton is on the telephone.”

  Cold water. That’s what it felt like. As if a wave of the stuff had broken through the plate glass and washed away all their fun. Mitch was blanketed in sudden guilt. He excused himself, rose from the table, and followed the maître d’ to the house phone.

  How Connie knew Mitch was at Portofino turned out to be a kind of detective work reserved only for married couples. She’d seen on the news that the Span was closed and, certain he wouldn’t wait until he got home to eat, called the three restaurants she knew of near where the Span joined the mainland. Portofino was last on the list. The call itself worked out to be relatively uneventful. One of their two golden retrievers had gotten into a tangle with a neighbor’s cat. Connie was at the veterinarian’s and wanted to know if Mitch could pick up a half gallon of nonfat milk on the way home. No problem, he told her.

  Throughout the remainder of the dinner, both Mitch and Rene kept the conversation on track, working out the small daily details of the campaign, mixed with a little talk about family. Mitch confessed to her that he’d been trading calls with his father for some two months now. It was par for the course, he told her. As a rule, his old man didn’t like lawyers. They were second only on the shit-pile to politicians.

  The Span cleared and the two-minute drive across was practically silent. Parked in front of the campaign headquarters, they said their good-nights. Then as Rene was crawling out of the car, she turned back to him. “I’m sorry,” she apologized.

  “Sorry for what?” he asked.

  “Earlier. At dinner,” she confessed. “I’m a tease when I drink.”

  That hair, he thought. That amazing hair, it strung over her face, her eyes peeking through it. Brave and embarrassed all at once. Mitch brushed it out of her face and kissed her. Full on, just like he’d been tempted to for so many damn months. Rene, she didn’t retreat, her lips softly held to his as long as he dared.

  And when he finally broke contact, “I’m sorry,” he found himself apologizing.

  “What for?”

  “For wanting to.” For wanting to so badly, he corrected in his mind.

  She shrugged with resignation. “I’m the girl.”

  “I better go.”

  “See you tomorrow,” was all that was left to say. Rene smiled, retracted herself from the car, and shut the door. Mitch watched her as she disappeared inside the old whorehouse building.

  In that old manse on Flower Hill, Mitch usually woke to the sound of newspapers flopping one by one onto neighboring driveways. For years the Cathedral Daily Mirror had been delivered by Harvey Gooden, a sixties burnout, in his original ‘64 Volkswagen bus. The drive up to 532 Broughton formed a canyon where even the smallest sound would carry. Even from the south-facing master window, Mitch would hear the newspaper call and ease ever so gently from the bed, careful to not wake Connie. Once downstairs, he would read the morning paper with a single cup of coffee before his five-mile run with their two golden retrievers, Merle and Pearl.

  But that Wednesday morning, Mitch didn’t run. In fact, he’d barely slept, thinking all the night about Rene, the kiss, and whether his slumbering wife had even the faintest clue of what he’d done. Downstairs, in the kitchen, the poor dogs sat idle, watching all the while as he read and reread Hollice Waters’s single-column piece on Cathedral’s newest underdog, Shakespeare McCann. Seventy-five thousand dollars in campaign funding?

  How could they? asked Mitch. Did the party leaders know what they were doing? This man was crazy. Worse. Psychotic. Violent. How dare they validate his kind of behavior! For over a month now, he had done his best to forget about the beating, finding what comfort and distraction he could in just about every way possible. In the campaign. In hard work. In those welcome, praising handshakes from just about everybody he’d run across. But in that moment at the breakfast table, the morning sun twisting upward through the backyard dogwoods and oaks, he was alone with the recollection of an assault so vivid that he didn’t realize the coffee cup was at his lips and he was gagging. He dropped the cup and it fell, splintering across the ancient tile floor.

  Connie arrived downstairs in time to find him kneeling and sweeping the splintered china into a dustpan. “Well, I hope it wasn’t one of Mother’s.”

  He looked up to find her smiling. “I think that leaves us at seven.” They’d broken four cups since their wedding day.

  “I guess when they all break, we’re done for,” she quipped as she crossed to the fridge and removed a carton of orange juice and a loaf of whole wheat bread.

  “Your mother’s twisting in her grave.”

  “Let her twist. I’m already looking for a new set. Thinking about redoing the whole kitchen, actually. Would you mind?”

  “I like it fine as is.” Mitch dumped the remains of the broken cup in the garbage pail in the pantry.

  “It’s my mother’s kitchen. It’s her house, when you think about it.” That’s when she moved in on him from behind and put her arms around his waist. Her hands were cold from the refrigerator. “Don’t you think it’s about time we made it our house?”

  “Anything you want,” he said.

  “Did you run?” To her touch, he felt dry, absent the usual stickiness that followed his morning runs.

  “Not yet. And now I’m late. Gotta shower, then a campaign to win.” Mitch kissed her ever so briefly, then turned to head back upstairs. Connie, though, held on to him.

  “How’s it going?”

  “What?”

  “The campaign,” she ventured. “Are you really going to win?”

  “Between you and me? Yes.” Another kiss and he was off.

  Yes.

  The word stung.

  Yes.

  He was going to win. He was going to be a congressman. And yes, they would have to move, leave the Island…leave her home.

  There would be no point in changing the kitchen or anything else.

  Born on Flower Hill to a family as old as the Island itself, Connie had never exactly felt a need to grow up in the traditional sense. The Island had always taken care of her, as had the magnificent Victorian home that had been built by her great-grandfather and left in her name by her deceased parents. Still, there had been no money in the will. Her parents’ extravagant lifestyle and apparent inability to deny themselves any luxury had provided their only daughter with a fairy-tale childhood. Private schools. European vacations. It had also devoured every penny they had, and then
some. Connie had inherited her parents’ debts and the house.

  When she was introduced to Mitch, she was a paralegal pulling hours equal to the partners in the law office of Gade, Seaton, and Peacock, just to make the payments on the second and third mortgages she was carrying. Mitch, on the other hand, was the new associate making the jump from another firm, and she was assigned to his desk. The romance that followed was like a prairie fire, she’d told all her girlfriends. Mitch and Connie instantly burned up the customary dating rituals and shot straight into cohabitation. After all, they were working alongside each other. Why not live together? They saved on rent and gas and just about every other expense. Plus she had great digs, he would proudly tell his law buddies. Just her and that big ol’ house. The neighbors talked and talked. Let ‘em, he said. They were in love and that was all that mattered. That would surely be enough.

  Connie remembered how Mitch had encouraged her to go to law school and cross that bridge into the real legal game. Instead she crossed a threshold in his arms and became Mrs. Dutton inside year one, forgoing her family name in exchange for the unspoken promise that he would never take the Island from her, or her from the Island. The same went for the house on Flower Hill where they would live forever, raise their children, and one day hold court to gaggles of grandchildren.

  Such was the fantasy. Such was a promise that was about to be dashed against the seawall that had become their marriage, where surging currents moved in opposite directions along a rocky ocean outcropping. Everyone knew Mitch was the front-runner. And front-runners usually win. And winners leave home, just like old Hurricane had, never to return for anything more than a free meal and a promise to play an honest game.

  Alone now save for Rosa, who would come and clean on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Connie was left to fill her days with charity work: the local public radio station. The annual March of Dimes telethon. Leukemia Society functions. Heart of the Gulf Foundation. And whenever she could, tending the large camellia garden and greenhouse her father had built at the rear of the property. Other times she would silently cry about the dream she and Mitch had failed to fulfill—to bless the big house with children.

  Ten A.M. Gina arrived in her new Mercedes convertible with the top down and her hair in a mad tussle. She leaned on the horn and shouted, “Connie! We’re gonna be late!” It was five more minutes before Connie appeared at the side door, dressed and made up for a day in Houston for the quarterly sorority luncheon.

  “What’s wrong with you, girl? You been crying?”

  “He says he’s gonna win.”

  “So what if he does? Nobody ever said you had to go with him,” shot back Gina with a confident grin.

  “What about the house? Who would live there?”

  “The house isn’t going anywhere. And neither are you if you don’t want to,” assured Gina.

  They were only words meant to make her feel comfy and cared for, and Connie knew it. Deep in her heart, though, she felt the struggle begin. A war was about to be waged between her home and her heart. The House on Flower Hill v. Mitch and the Congressional Seat. She was afraid for herself and the part of her that would undoubtedly lose.

  Crossing the Span into Cathedral City, Gina put the hammer down in the Mercedes and racked a new CD into the deck. The music thumped. And Connie tried to roll a joint without losing too many buds to the wind. “Shit!”

  “Don’t forget to flush the seeds,” joked Gina. “Maybe we’ll get pulled over for speeding. Get busted. It’d be in the papers.”

  “That would be mean.”

  “And what’s he being to you? Mr. Wonderful?”

  “He’s being Mitch.”

  “Rhymes with sonofabitch.”

  “He is not,” defended Connie. “He’s just never home. I hardly ever see him.”

  She bit her lip and went with her gut. “If I were pregnant, I betcha he wouldn’t be running for office. He’d be where he belongs.”

  “And you think that’s the reason?”

  “He’s just bored, that’s all.”

  “Bored with you. And you know what that means.”

  “Not Mitch. He’s too principled.”

  “He’s controlling.”

  “He’s my husband, G.”

  “He’s a man. Men have penises. And when they’re bored they play with them,” said Gina. “I swear it’s true. I read it in Cosmo.”

  “You should try reading a book.”

  “What happens when he wins, Connie? Seriously. He’ll want to move. He promised you he wouldn’t make you leave the Island.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when it comes.”

  End of subject. But all the way to Houston, inside Gina’s perverse skull, were the beginnings of a plan. A plan that would surely release Connie from the internment that was her marriage.

  North of Houston is Dallas. And thirty years earlier, Dallas had but one downtown. Little more than four corners, it was flanked on one side by a modern, eight-story jail, and a schoolbook depository on the other. With a curvy little drive that swiveled in between grassy knolls and park benches, retreating westward and underneath a railroad trestle, Dealy Plaza gained an identity all its own one November day in 1963. Soon after, the city fathers had seen fit to abolish any master plan to further develop the west end of Dallas, and focused eastward in creating their business mecca. Eventually the old downtown was dwarfed by sparkling structures built from glass and steel. By 1975 Dallas had its own skyline as distinct as any modern American city, leaving Dealy Plaza as little more than a painful reminder—a landmark, frozen in time and political infamy.

  Like so many organizations before them, the Texas Republican Central Committee had long since abandoned their Dealy Plaza offices in exchange for the entire eleventh floor of the Union Bank building in the lustrous new downtown.

  William “Zig” Ziegler was late getting into the office that Friday morning the Daily Mirror had touted the party’s generous contribution to the McCann campaign. Forty-nine and the father of five, he was a picture of new health with a thick head of hair and a body recently leaned on doctor’s orders by a home StairMaster and HealthRider. At the ding of the elevator, he stormed through the lobby with barely a nod to the receptionist before vanishing into the maze that was the Central Committee’s base of operations.

  “I want a copy of the Cathedral Daily Mirror on my desk. Now!” said Zig in place of his usual cheerful “Good morning.” The door to his office slammed, leaving the air behind him still. The day was not off to a good start.

  His office was well appointed, but tackily adorned with a wall plastered with cheaply framed pictures of Zig with Republican celebrities, including Barry Goldwater, Bob Dole, Ronald Reagan, and Colin Powell. Perched on a credenza behind his desk were family pictures. Mostly of his eighteen-year-old daughter, a tawny blonde with Miss Texas, U.S.A., sort of features. A real local beauty. The black-and-white eight-by-ten head shot showed the girl had modeling prospects.

  Zig was calling Hollice Waters for the fourth time that morning. He’d started just after seven, dialing from his Fort Worth home, trying again at eight and eighty-thirty with no returns. If Hollice didn’t answer this time, Zig’s next call was going to be Charlie Flores, Hollice’s editor. Someone needed to be the unfortunate recipient of his vitriol. Instead, before he finished dialing, a message scrolled in green letters across the screen of his Amtel.

  —Shakespeare McCann is—

  He cut off the message by hitting the code key that returned to his secretary a message that read:

  —Call back—

  Hollice’s line at the Daily Mirror was ringing at the other end of his line when a new message scrolled by:

  —Shakespeare McCann is here to see you!—

  The message momentarily shook him. He’d avoided McCann’s calls for months. The Republican nominee whom the Central Committee’s chair had refused to even acknowledge was now standing outside Zig’s closed door. He wasn’t the Committee’s choice. Or e
ven the People’s. The man beyond the door, in the eyes of the Central Committee, was lucky. Nothing more. In a time when campaign cash was always better spent on candidates who could win, and when the Committee was expecting tight races all over the state come November, Shakespeare McCann was less than an afterthought. He was a total write-off.

  “Sonofabitch,” said Zig to himself. He’d have preferred to talk to Hollice first. Get the reporter’s story straight before facing off against the candidate who’d fraudulently asserted to have been given seventy-five grand of the Central Committee’s cash.

  Then ding. Another message scrolled across the screen:

  —Mr. McCann has brought you a copy of the Daily Mirror—

  Reluctantly he crossed to the door that only moments earlier he’d slammed shut, opening it slowly and drawing a smile across his face. “Mr. McCann. I’m glad we finally have the pleasure of meeting. I’m sorry it’s taken us so long.”

  Shakespeare was out of his seat and pumping Zig’s hand, that patented salesman’s smile on his face and contact-blue eyes showing zero sign of the utter contempt he felt for the Republican chair. Not only had Zig not returned his numerous calls, but he’d passed Shakespeare by as he’d breezed into the office. Hadn’t even noticed him chatting it up with the office staff, telling jokes and generally keeping anybody within earshot entertained. Yet he accepted Zig’s hand as if it were the friendliest of encounters.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ziegler.” Then he followed the chairman back into his office. Once again, the door was closed.

  “You brought me a copy of the Mirror,” said Zig, seating himself across from the candidate. “Only minutes ago I’d asked my secretary for a copy.”

  “I know. I was there,” said Shakespeare, finding a comfortable seat. He let the insult roll off, crossed his legs, and seemed as relaxed as a house cat.