American Savior (29 page)

By the time we had worked our way across Interstate 90 to Spokane, stopping for a rally at Moses Lake and a good night’s sleep at Ritzville, there were only forty days left until the election. We were moving toward that worrisome week when we were supposed to hit the TV and radio shows
en masse,
as they say. From Spokane, Jesus instructed us to head over to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for one fast rally in the heart of Maplewith country.

It surprised me that Jesus would do something that smacked of in-your-faceness. I have a journal entry for the night before his speech that reads: “Is he worried about Maplewith?” And at the rally, in front of only about a hundred people and a hundred or so members of the press, he surprised me again by mentioning the Bible. As I’ve said, he had made it a point not to talk about religious issues. There were no biblical references in his speeches. It was as if he wanted to win the election on human merits, as it were, on the strength of his ideas. This seemed crazy to me because, though his ideas were good, original, sound ideas, and his personality was likable, even charismatic, it was obvious—at least to Wales, Zelda, and me—that our success to that point was based more on name recognition than any other single factor. With a tiny, unprofessional organization like ours, someone who
wasn’t
named Jesus Christ would have had a snowball’s chance in the Republic of the Congo of being noticed by the national media.

After the assassination attempt, Jesus himself seemed to understand
this. Or maybe he’d understood it all along, and all along had planned to wait for the final weeks to play the God card. In any case, standing on the stage of a hotel conference room in Coeur d’Alene, he talked about the Bible for the first time in the campaign, and for the first time came close to attacking one of his rivals. I would realize, much later, that this was another chess move, all part of his grand plan, but at the time it surprised me.

“You know,” he said, microphone in hand, walking back and forth near the front of the stage, “not that much has changed in the last two thousand years. Yes, we have computers, cars, and televisions now, we dress differently, we do different kinds of work in some cases. But the mix of good and bad, faithful and faithless, has remained consistent. In those days there were people exactly like the Reverend Maplewith, Marjorie’s husband. They enjoyed a large following. They lived in grand houses. They were sure, absolutely sure, that their words were the word of God. And yet when the Son of Man came into their midst they did exactly what Reverend Maplewith did: they demanded a sign. Well, I can tell you something: I didn’t give them a sign then, and I am not giving them a sign now!”

There was a fairly enthusiastic cheer from the small crowd, but I didn’t think it was a particularly strong line. In another ten days Jesus would be on national TV, on Bobby Biggs’s
Meet the Media,
probably the most watched and most respected of the political talk shows, and his big line was going to be, “I didn’t give them a sign then and I’m not giving them one now”?

Still, as the reporters in the crowd smirked and scribbled, Jesus pressed confidently on. “What the good reverend doesn’t understand, and what most of the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t understand in those long-ago days, is that the issue here is not what God can do for you, it is what you can do for yourselves! Could it be that God has already given you everything you need? That the Kingdom of Heaven is, in actual fact, within you? Could it be that you are always looking outside yourselves for solutions, looking for a savior, when you yourselves are capable of making this world into a kind of paradise, of making your own lives peaceful and
productive? Even living in such a way as to make your own death free of fear and anxiety? If any country on earth is capable of understanding these things, it is this country, with its riches, its long history of accepting the bold and optimistic from all corners of the earth, its great tradition of doing what no one else in the world thought possible. That is the message of America, that kind of limitless thinking. And it is a message, an attitude, that, with your help, I will bring back to the office of the president of the United States. Thank you!”

For once, Jesus did not take questions. He left the stage to what seemed to me polite and perhaps puzzled applause. With police and a couple of Fultonville tough guys walking on either side of us, we moved him out a side door and into a limousine, and raced back to the airport. The whole event had a strange flavor. So much so that, in a private moment, Zelda asked me if I thought the assassination attempt had changed him.

“Too early to tell,” I said. “But that rally didn’t exactly fit in with what we’ve seen so far.”

“A doctor at the hospital told me they thought they would lose him there, for a few minutes. Maybe he saw the white light and got a new perspective, or something.”

“I think he always sees the white light. And I think that bullet would have killed him, if he’d let it. We’re talking about an eighth of an inch.”

“I sense a change in him,” she said.

“Maybe he’s tired of being shot, crucified, stabbed, beaten, yelled at, betrayed. Wouldn’t you be, if you did absolutely nothing to hurt people, ever, and they treated you like that? He’s mad as hell. He’s not going to take it anymore.”

“Be serious, Russ.”

“I am serious. I think he has a big problem with the attitude of a lot of so-called Christians, and I think he’s been looking for a way to send them a message ever since we went to Kansas. Maybe his whole reason for coming here now was to make the point that they’re doing certain things—hating people, judging people—in his name, and he doesn’t want those things done in his name. He forgot about it for a while, in California, because there aren’t any so-called Christians there, and because
he was having so much fun, surfing and eating doughnuts. And then one of them took a couple of shots at him, and now he’s fighting back. I kind of like it, I have to say.”

Zelda was pinching her eyebrows up, playing with the earring in her right ear. “There are plenty of good Christians,” she said.

“I know that. Joe Lesteen is upbeat and fun to listen to. What’s her name, Fryers, makes sense, too. It’s not that type that gets to him, it’s the hateful ones, the small-minded ones, the ones who—”

“I feel like he’s always one or two steps ahead of us,” she went on, as if she wasn’t really listening. “I feel like this is going to trigger something, that triggers something else, that ends up where he wants it to.”

I nodded thoughtfully, but it wasn’t until much later, after the chess game had played itself out, that I understood how right Zelda was.

T
HE PLAN WAS
for us to fly east and spend the week leading up to the
Meet the Media
interview on a tour of the upper Midwest—Chicago, Detroit, Madison, Minneapolis.

But once we were in the limo, Wales, who’d been as surprised as Zel and I at the biblical reference, made a casual remark. “We’ve had a generous new invitation,” he said sarcastically. “Not on our schedule. Wanted to run it past you anyway.”

“What is it?” Jesus asked him.

“Bit of a risk,” Wales went on. “But it’s more or less on our way, and as long as you seem to be in a combative mood.… Well, this guy who invited us has a church out in eastern Montana. Border with North Dakota. Medium-sized church, maybe a few hundred. Along the lines of Maplewith’s place, you know, call themselves Christians. Politically active. Anti-tax. Anti-government. Anti-gay. Anti-abortion. Anti-evolution. Anti-Catholic. Anti-Jew. Anti – people of color. Pro – raking in the big money. Anyway, guy’s name is Pitchens. Issued a challenge for you to come talk to his congregation tomorrow. Sunday, you know. Isn’t interested in miracles or anything, just wants to let you have your say in front of his people. I’m leaning no, seems fishy to me, but wanted to—”

“We’ll do it,” Jesus said.

“Really? Montana’s got all of three electoral votes, and we haven’t spent any time in—”

“I’m not interested in electoral votes. Electoral votes mean nothing to me. The first order of business when I get elected is to move to abolish the electoral college.”

“All right. We’ll set it up. It means getting in late to Madison, and we have a rally there that night—”

“Set it up,” Jesus said, and then, almost immediately, he seemed to fall asleep. It would turn out that this wasn’t sleep at all, but a kind of trance, a meditative state he would go into frequently over the coming weeks. After it happened half a dozen times in my presence, I asked him about it, and he told me it was a practice he’d learned in Tibet. He needed to recharge periodically, he said. “In the old days, I’d walk out into the desert and people would leave me alone. But that’s not possible here, so I go into the internal desert. I rest.”

He “rested” in the limousine on the road south to the Boise airport, while Wales and Zel and I busied ourselves with phone calls to arrange the church event: transportation, media outlets, police. We were pros at it by that point. My brother, sitting beside Jesus as he always did when we traveled, took Jesus’s hand in his and closed his own eyes in imitation. Since the assassination attempt, Stab hadn’t been his usual happy self. I’d made a point, more than once, of telling him that I thought we had nothing to worry about. Jesus’s premonition about being shot at, twice, had come true; he’d survived both shots, so we were all set. But I could see that Stab wasn’t sure, and I wondered if he knew, or sensed, something the rest of us did not.

As Wales had suspected, the Montana church event turned out to be a setup. The day after our Boise rally we flew into Frank Miley Field near Miles City, Montana, then drove a short distance to Kinsey, where the church was located. Looking around at the slanting, empty prairie, I could not see how there could possibly be very many people at the Sunday service, but we had been reminded that this was Montana, where a six-hour drive was like going to the corner store for milk.

Sure enough, when we pulled up to the modern steel and glass Church
of Christ in God, it was a mob scene. Two TV trucks were there, which should have been a tip-off. Months after the election, we would learn from various sources that the Reverend Maplewith had arranged the whole thing. It would have been too risky to have Jesus at his own church, given the fact that his wife was one of Jesus’s opponents. So he declined and then secretly arranged for his good friend the Reverend Peter Pitchens to hold the event at the Church of Christ in God, to which Maplewith bussed five hundred of his most radical followers. We would come to think of it as “the ambush.”

But, at the time, we were just doing what Jesus wanted us to do. We arrived at the church in our white limos and pulled up as close to the side door as we could get. We had added another limo to accommodate the beefed-up security force—a few more of Dukey’s biker pals. They jumped out first and moved people aside to make a corridor for us. Wales and I, Enrica and Dukey, Stab, my mom and dad, Zelda—we followed Jesus into the church, walking through unfriendly air. There were no placards being waved—Pitchens and Maplewith must have given the word that their congregation should not look like an attack force in front of the cameras—but there was a nasty murmuring and only a fraction of the local police I’d asked for. Instead of stopping to shake hands and make small talk, as he ordinarily would have, Jesus kept his eyes forward like a man going to his executioner. He ducked into the side door of the church without saying a word to any of us.

Places had been saved in the front pew for the campaign staff. As security chief, I was allowed to stand against a side wall with Enrica, Dukey, and his boys. Without consulting us, Pastor Pitchens had asked the uniformed police to remain outside, and they did so. It occurred to me, looking around at the traditional church decor, that all of it—the crosses and stained glass, the pulpit and hymnals—was actually in honor of the man who now sat up on the stage beside Pastor Pitchens. But it didn’t feel that way. Pitchens, tall, stick-thin, dressed in a dark suit, got up and read a passage from the Old Testament, and went on about it for half an hour or so while I alternately scanned the crowd for lunatics and watched my mom and dad and brother and fiancée to assess their mood.
Nervous, is the way I would put it. Jittery to the max. You can feel hatred, even when you can’t see it, even when no one has said so much as one hateful word. It was a strange juxtaposition, being surrounded by the religious imagery, listening to the biblical phrases, and feeling the pulse and flutter of that hatred.

Pitchens was the setup man, and he played his role perfectly. “And now, my friends,” he said (he had one of those deep, resonant voices that seemed almost to be the voice of God but was really closer to the voice of Hurry Linneament), “And now we have the great honor of hearing the words of one of the candidates for the most important political office on the face of our earth. This is nothing, of course, in comparison with the heavenly offices, but nevertheless, as we have seen over the years, our president is often called upon to do the work of our Lord on earth, the work of Christ, in some ways, in certain arenas, until the day when Christ himself shall return to separate us the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff, and cast the sinners into the eternal flames, and bring the saved to glory with him in heaven for all eternity. And so now, let us give our full attention to one of the candidates for this great office.”

I noticed, as I’m sure everyone else did, that Pitchens neglected to refer to Jesus by name. Jesus stood, shook Pitchens’s hand, and walked slowly to the pulpit. The crowd stirred uneasily. I watched my brother, fear painted on his face, turn around and swing his eyes over the rows of people behind him.

Jesus put his hands on the sides of the pulpit, and offered his beautiful smile to the congregation. “Thank you for having me,” he said, in his own version of the resonant God voice. “It is a real honor to have been invited to speak to you, and I would like to thank the Reverend Pitchens for his kind hospitality.” He paused. Someone at the back of the crowd said one word, quite loudly, but I could not make it out, and Jesus did not respond. I nodded to Dukey, who dispatched two of his friends to go and stand near the back, in case the heckler needed a reminder about whose house he was in.