American Savior (14 page)

After it had gone on for I don’t know how long, ten minutes I’d guess, Jesus let go of Zelda’s hand and motioned me over. He put his mouth against my ear, and he said these words: “Call your dad.”

SEVENTEEN

So, as Jesus walked from one side of the stage to the other, pointing at people in the cheering crowd as if he knew them, raising an index finger above his head like a quarterback after a touchdown throw, mouthing, “Thank you! Thank you!” I crouched at the back of the stage, and dialed my dad’s number. He picked up on the first ring. “Pa!” I yelled, and he yelled something back. I could hear his voice but I couldn’t make out the words. “Pa, you there?”

“—tching the TV!” I thought he yelled.

“Do you see us?”

“Bltng di font if sel!” it sounded like.

“He’s something, isn’t he?”

“Lie shoe. Shoe aw!”

“Okay. I can’t hear you too good. It’s crazy here. We miss you. Come up, okay? You don’t have to believe or anything. Just come and be with us. All right? Pa?”

The line had gone dead. I couldn’t tell if he’d hung up or if the thunderous noise of the crowd had knocked over a cell phone tower on a nearby hillside. We had a group hug then, me and Zel and my mother and Stab, as Jesus went back and forth across the stage, now lifting Wales’s hand into the air, now Ezzie’s, now flashing his phenomenal smile, now pushing up two fists in time to the JEE-ZUS! JEE-ZUS!” chant.

Eventually, he decided it was time to go, and looked over his shoulder
at me the way the lead singer in a rock band looks at the drummer and bass player to signal the end of a song. I relayed the signal to Oscar, who crawled back into the Hummer and set himself up behind the wheel, and then to Dukey, who got his beefy leg breakers lined up in such a way that we had about a yard-wide corridor from stage to car. Even with the bikers pushing and shoving, people were reaching out to touch Jesus on the shoulder or the arm, or falling on their knees, or yelling things. As we climbed into the Hummer, two police cars backed in through the crowd, sirens going, lights flashing. With the cruisers running interference we made it out of Banfield Plaza and onto what was now a slightly less crowded, litter-paved Wilson Street.

“That went well,” Jesus said, as we were running red lights behind the police cars, on our way back to Padsen’s.

“A blast!” Stab said.

“What now?” I asked excitedly. “What’s next? Give us our marching orders, Boss.”

He looked at me and I noticed that, behind the chocolate brown eyes, there seemed to be a deep well of absolute calm. On the surface he seemed, if not excited, than at least pleased with how things had gone. Gratified. Optimistic. Those were the types of emotions you would have expected; there was something
human
about them, for lack of a better term. A few hairs had been knocked out of place. There was a thin coating of sweat on his neck and forehead—all normal. But the bright stillness in his eyes was something not of this world. My mother noticed, I was sure. In her adoration, she was almost shrinking back into the corner of the seat. The picture of the pope was gone, and she was working the rosary beads a mile a minute, and staring.

“What now?” the object of her adoration answered. “Now I am going to wander around alone for a few hours and you should all go back and get something to eat, get some rest. Tomorrow we will talk about strategy.”

“Wander around?” I said, perhaps too forcefully, because Zelda swung her knee sideways against my leg. “As your security guy, I don’t want you wandering around. People know you now. They’ll recognize you. They’ll
crush you to death trying to get close. Plus, this neighborhood is not exactly known for—”

“Let me worry about that,” he said. Calmly.

“It’s nuts. We have to get you off someplace, some safe house or something. It’s all different now. That scene we just came from, that was broadcast around the country, probably around the world.”

“Let me worry about it, Russ,” he said, and at the sound of my name on his lips a chill ran across the skin of my arms, a thousand tiny eight-legged creatures scurrying.

“You sure?”

He nodded. A little smile. “Maybe tomorrow Stab and I will find a bar where we can play pool.”

“He knows about Stab and pool,” my mother whispered.

Jesus looked at her and said, “In these two sons you should be most proud. And in your future daughter-in-law as well.”

My mother, naturally, started to cry. Stab reached across to comfort her. I watched.

In a little while we were passing through the gates of Padsen’s. The irony of police cars leading Jesus into such a place was not lost on me. I have to admit that another spark of doubt flew up in my mind: as Bastatutta said, why was Jesus doing business with an underworld guy?

Standing in the lot, we thanked Oscar for his good driving. Oscar asked Jesus for his autograph and held out a parking ticket, which he’d pulled from his back pocket, and which he appeared to have no intention of ever paying. Jesus obliged, scrawling his name in blue marker across the orange paper. And then all of us—my mother and Stab, Zelda and I and Jesus—crowded into Jocko’s shed (Wales and Ezzie had gone to see about the headquarters rental; Ada Montpelier and her son had stayed behind at Banfield Plaza with Dukey Senior), where the calendars had been taken down and the shrink-wrapped stacks of porno mags hidden away, and where Jocko was standing next to the coffeemaker pouring an evil-smelling black brew into Styrofoam cups and setting them on the desk in a crooked line. Zelda wrote him a check for eight hundred dollars, which made him blush—probably the most shocking of all the
shocking sights I’d seen that day. But his embarrassment did not keep him from folding the check in half and pushing it into the pocket of his tailored pants.

“Would you give us a moment alone?” Jesus asked him, and blushing and dipping his head in small pseudo-reverent movements, Jocko stepped out into the sunlight and closed the door.

Jesus held out the one chair, and motioned for my mother to sit in it. She hesitated, shook her head, worked her beads.

“Ma, sit,” Stab told her. “He wants you to, Ma.”

Jesus kept his hands on the back of the chair until she was seated, and then he stepped away and stood with his back to the door. He took off his tie, folded it neatly, and slipped it into the side pocket of his jacket. “You did well,” he told us. “This is a proper beginning. I shall leave you now for a short while, but,” he looked at me, “do not lose faith.”

“What do we do next, Lord?” Zelda asked.

Jesus made the smallest of frowns. For some reason, he seemed not to mind when Stab and my mother called him God or Lord, but with Zelda it did not please him.

“You work it out,” he said. The tone was not unkind, but it was tinged with impatience, as if we should have known, by then, everything he wanted us to know; as if we should have been experts on running a campaign, at the center of which was the most famous man in Western history. And then, more gently, he added, “I have spoken to Wales about our schedule. I understand he is going to get you all together tomorrow.”

“Will you be there?” Zelda asked.

Jesus looked at her more tenderly. “Perhaps. Stab and I are playing pool later in the day. After that we should begin our travels.”

At that moment, I heard what sounded like a gunshot outside in the lot. I dove across the room and knocked Jesus down, covering him with my body the way I’d seen Secret Service men do on television.

“Russell!” my mother yelled.

Jesus was not happy. “Off me, get off,” he said. We stood up—I made a point of keeping my body between him and the window, thinking it might have been Padsen taking a pot shot. Zelda and Stab were glaring
at me as if I were a lunatic. Jesus was brushing the dust from the pant legs and sleeves of his excellent suit.

“I heard a shot,” I explained. “I thought someone was shooting at you.”

Jesus straightened his sleeves. “A car backfiring, Russell.”

“You could have
hurt
him,” Zelda said.

I started to explain to him in more detail, to say that I’d heard what sounded like gunfire—not exactly a rare sound in West Zenith in those days—but he put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt the usual zip of current. Our faces were not more than a foot apart. I could see then that he had very little facial hair, and I wondered if he had Indian blood. The strong nose was slightly bent, the skin remarkably unlined. It occurred to me that we had no idea how old he was. “We have a problem,” I said. “You have to be born in America to be president.”

“Not an issue.”

“You have to be thirty-five.”

“Also not a problem.”

“Where
were
you born? The press is going to ask. They’re going to start asking a million questions now, about where you stand on various issues. There have already been some blog postings that wondered about your past—and we don’t have so much as a paragraph of biographical material.”

“Make something up,” Jesus said.

“We can’t
lie.
”

“You won’t be lying.”

“But you just said to make something up. What do you mean it won’t be a lie? Of course—”

“Russell,” Zelda said. “Stop.”

“Fine,” I said. “You do it.” Maybe it was a sort of decompression after the morning’s tension, but I felt a bubble of anger at Zelda working its way up into my mouth. I loved her, I admired her, but I’d pretty much had it by then with the idea that her adoration of Jesus—which I did not object to in principle—seemed to go hand in hand with her ignoring me. God knows I had been trying my best, and it wasn’t easy, what with
the family dynamics to think about and the introduction and everything. And all I had been getting from her were these nudges, these turned-down lips, the rare hug. I felt that I deserved better.

“She will,” Jesus said. “That is part of her responsibility. You are the security man, and, for the record, I appreciate your knocking me down. It reminded me of my football-playing days in Kansas. So there, you have a bit of biographical information. Football. Kansas. I also studied ballet at a school outside of New York City, but dropped out when I pulled my oblique muscle, right side. Build on that. Do your research. We will discuss my positions on the issues once the campaign gets on the road. I love you all and shall see all of you very soon.”

And with that, he went past me and out the door, closing it quietly, and leaving the air of the room filled with what I can only call an affectionate awkwardness. We were not yet used to being in his presence. None of us had ever felt that kind of straightforward, no-nonsense, divine, and immeasurably deep affection. And we were, I think, afraid, because on that morning we had realized that we were at the center of some kind of sandstorm, something massively powerful and unpredictable. I was used to the spotlight, so in that way, possibly, it was five percent easier for me than for the others. But the spotlight I was used to had been like one of those penlights people read with on a train. This was like the sun.

I could not look at Zelda, and could not think of anything to say, so I turned to my mother and offered the first thing that came into my mind. “I called Pa.”

“What did he say?” Stab wanted to know, and he wanted to know it very loudly. “What did Pa say? WHAT DID PA SAY!”

“He was watching us on the TV. I couldn’t understand the rest of it. I think he said he misses us.”

“I miss him,” Stab said. “And I’m tired, Russ. And I feel like, I feel like, I feel like….” This happened to him sometimes when he was excited or upset. The record got stuck. My mother and I were used to it, we let him go on for six more
I feel likes,
and then he got it out, “I feel like I’m very fast inside. I feel like I did something wrong.”

“You think Jesus would want to play pool with you if you did something wrong, Pal?”

“I don’t know. I just feel bad. I think I should feel good but I feel bad.” He was on the verge of crying again.

“
I
did something wrong. I tackled God. It was almost a sin. But I was trying to save him from being hurt. I’m kind of like his bodyguard, you know. That’s my new job. You’re his first assistant. I’m his bodyguard.”

“But why would anybody want to hurt God?” my brother asked, his big pale eyes even more turned down at the corners than usual, his mouth quivering.

“They wouldn’t,” Zelda said. “You don’t have to think about that. Nobody’s going to hurt anybody. Your brother’s being foolish.”

It was a more or less harmless remark, I suppose, just Zel trying to make Stab feel good. But the bubble of anger came up into my mouth then, and I was biting down on it hard, and needing some space, and unable to look at her, and I knew my mother could sense that there was some trouble between me and my new fiancée—mothers have a radar for things like that—and so I said, “Listen, you guys take my car and go out to get something to eat, and then go over to Zelda’s. Go over there, watch TV, and let me know what they’re saying about us. I have to, you know … get with Wales for a while and figure out how we’re going to handle things from here, schedulewise. Come over to the condo later and I’ll make a big dinner for everybody. Okay, Stab?”

“Okay, Russ.”

I gave him a big hug, and gave my mother a big hug, and, though Zelda was reaching toward me, I just squeezed her shoulder without making eye contact and went out the door and into the lot. Jocko was there, smoking. He started toward me, but I waved him off and went out into the street and hustled away, hoping nobody recognized me.

I know it was petty, the way I acted. I admit that. I confess—I am a petty man, prone to jealousy, easily made insecure. In the midst of the confusion and excitement and the newness and scariness of it, all I wanted was for Zelda to see that I was on unfamiliar ground and trying to keep my balance, trying to do the right thing. It was, though—I
was thinking about this as I hurried along West Zenith’s tattered east side—it was as if she were expecting me to suddenly become someone I was not. She seemed to have fallen immediately into a warm relationship with my mother and brother, and I was happy about that, of course. And I knew that Jesus had seen how smart and capable she was, and that he’d picked the right person for the press liaison job. I was happy about the idea that we were working on such an important project together, not even a project really, more like a crusade.