``There isn't any doubt,'' he said.
``It's common knowledge in the universities. It's their secret. But I broke their code. Me. Long distance trucker. They can't silence me. When my book comes out you'll see.''
Most people knew to avoid him. The checkers at the grocery, the people at the truck stops.
On 94 across Eastern Montana through endless night the string of obscenities on the CB sometimes dissolved into earnest discussion of Shakespeare's true identity.
He had several other truckers convinced.
Shakespeare was the son of an American Indian.
He said he'd seen the papers that proved it. They were very fragile because the paper had been made from tobacco leaves and they were kept in a special environment at William and Mary College in Virginia. There were records of the birth of a blue eyed boy child to an Indian girl in 1564.
In 1566 when an English ship plied the coast, an Indian woman took her child to the ship and begged the captain to take him back to England. The woman was a story teller and travelled far and the child was a trouble to her.
``Let him live in his father's world,'' she said, ``his name is Flying Arrow.''
The boy was raised by hangers on at the royal court and he was entertained and educated by the scholars and thinkers of the day. And no one knew it but he used words as his mother used words in far America.
The trucker had stuff he'd printed off the computer. Sheaves of it. But he had a problem. He couldn't write. Shakespeare could write. He couldn't.
He'd never really read a book all the way through.
How did you put words together to tell a story that would fill a book? How did you do it?
He tried a couple of times. Sat at the kitchen table and tried to organize it all.
Then he picked up Shakespeare on Interstate 10. He'd just clocked 105 and he got this feeling he'd better slow down and move over. Juarez signaled for miles across the dark river and there on the shoulder was Shakespeare. It was a bad place to pick up a hitch hiker but he did it anyway.
``Its a good story you got there,'' Shakespeare said. He didn't speak English well.
He wanted off at an abandoned gas station.
``Take my advice,'' Shakespeare said as he climbed out of the truck, ``Don't try to write a book - write it as a screen play.''