American Savior (13 page)

My mother was looking at him with some suspicion, I noticed, but Stab was already down on both knees in the little office and he was crying. Jesus tossed the paperback aside and stood up.

“Jesus,” I said, “this is my mother, Maria, but everyone calls her Mudgie. And this is my brother, Steven, who everyone refers to as Stab.”

Jesus came over and kissed my mother on both cheeks, in the European fashion, hands on her shoulders. She shivered and I knew that she’d felt the same current I’d felt when Jesus had touched me. Whatever suspicions might have been hovering behind the flesh of her face flew out the barred window. Jesus then reached down, lifted Stab to his feet and embraced him. “My number one guy,” he said. “Good of you to come all the way here. They gave you time off from the sandwich shop?”

Stab was positively weeping by that point, tears dripping from his chin onto the collar of his shirt, and from there onto the rolled-up picture of the pope. He nodded.

“Who told him about the sandwich shop?” I said, and when my mother heard me she made the sign of the cross three times. For some reason she chose that moment to hold out the picture of the pope to Jesus, as if she wanted him to autograph it. Jesus looked at the picture and smiled in a way that was completely ambiguous. In a voice that was gentler than anything I’d heard from him up to that point, he told Stab, “We have a lot of work to do today, you and I, so dry up the faucet please.”

“Yes, God,” he said, and Jesus did not correct him.

My mother was saying a prayer under her breath. Her eyes were fixed on the man in the suit. The man in the suit winked at her.

“It’s a madhouse out there,” I told him.

He nodded. “We will make some waves today.”

At that point Jocko came through the door in a cloud of stogie smoke.

“Why don’t we settle up?” he said, looking at me. “I’m prepared to give this here guy a discount. For bein’ a good guy. Ya know, special.”

“
Capo di tutti capi,
” I said, but Jocko apparently did not see the humor in this, and he did not smile.

“Let’s say ten percent discount. The Hummer limo is usually a grand a day. Let’s make it nine, even.”

“You should give it to him free,” Zelda told him. She had been standing quietly off to the side, but she pronounced this sentence with a force that was all too familiar to me. “This is Jesus Christ,” she went on. “As in Jesus Christ sent from heaven. You’re going to charge him for a car?”

“Huh?”

“What if he’s president of the United States by next year,” I said, taking up the refrain. “Do you want to be known as the person who charged him for your services?”

“Hey, I run a business here,” Jocko said. He looked from Zelda to me to my mother and back, as if everyone but him got the joke. Jesus seemed not to be paying attention.

“This is God!” Stab said loudly. “Are you crazy? Are you a bad man? Do you want to go to hell forever?”

I put a hand on my brother’s shoulder to quiet him, but I have to say I liked seeing Jocko squirm there behind his smokescreen, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, taking the cigar out of his mouth and working his thick lips. If nothing else, it gave him a taste of the same medicine he’d been forcing down his debtors’ throats for years. After a few seconds of indecision he said, “Twenty percent then. Best I can do. Comes wit a driver, ya know.”

The driver was a short fellow of indeterminate ethnicity named Oscar Oswald. He sat behind the wheel, silent as a stone, and turned the Hummer limo out into the crowds. For a few blocks we went along unmolested. But then, even though the windows were tinted, the word must have gotten around that Jesus was inside, because people began pressing against the glass and fenders.

“Russ, it’s scary,” Stab said. He was sitting beside Jesus, his back facing the direction we were going, and he had a hand on the candidate’s knee.

“Can you move faster?” I asked Oscar.

“And what, mahn, kill some dude?”

“Without killing someone, could you move a little faster?”

“They crawlin’ on the hood, dude.”

It was true. At least two people were on the hood and a dozen others pressed their faces against the windows on either side. Jesus was sitting calmly in the seat facing us, Stab clutching his knee, with the crumpled picture of the pope in his other hand. As the security chief, I felt that my first big assignment was not starting off well. For one thing, I did not like
the look on some of the faces we could see. The people crawling up the hood, now onto the windshield (Oscar had the bright idea to turn on the wipers and spray them with wiper fluid, which momentarily made them stay still but after that it made them angry, and they started banging on the glass with the palms of their hands), were especially disconcerting—two middle-aged men with stubble and jean jackets. Another second and one of them took out a gun. Oscar leaned on the horn in panic, but the man raised the gun and fired twice into the air, and suddenly you could feel the release of the weight that had been pressing against the sides of the car. The second man peered in through the windshield, saw me, and gave a thumbs-up. He shouted something I could not hear. He shouted it again, louder. “Dukey’s guys!” And then, “Scorched Earth, man.”

“Everything under control?” Jesus asked calmly, without turning around to look at them. Stab still had a hand on his knee. My mother was saying the rosary under her breath. Zelda was looking out the window and sitting so that there was space between her thigh and mine.

“No problem.”

“That’s a Glock, dude,” Oscar said, with some admiration.

“He works for us,” I said. “Plow on.”

With the two Scorched Earth employees riding on the hood and threatening those who pressed too closely against the car, we made it to Wilson Street, where the first uniformed person I saw was Chief Bastatutta. He was thrusting one arm this way and that and shouting orders through a bullhorn. Wilson Street was, if not clear of people, at least thinly enough populated that it seemed we could make it to the stage. As we went past, I rolled down the window and said, “Excellent work, Chief.” He turned to the side and spit.

There, near the stage, as Dukey had promised, was a ring of Harley Davidsons, chrome pipes gleaming, owners standing with their huge arms crossed, facing the crowd. And what a crowd it was! As we stepped out of the black Hummer I became aware of the thundering noise. The term
sea of faces
came to mind, as did the term
Poop Safe.
I held my mother in one arm and Zelda in the other. Jesus and Stab were in front
of us. As we approached the ring of bikes, Dukey himself appeared from behind one of his employees, and, with an expression as somber as a funeral attendant opening a car door for a new widow, he moved one of the bikes aside to make a narrow alley. Jesus and Stab passed through and we followed. On the way I patted Dukey hard on the flak jacket and said, “Excellent work.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” he said.

In another few steps we were up on the stage that the guys from Dermott’s had put together the night before. I recognized the podium—it had been “borrowed” from Anderson’s Restaurant, where the monthly Rotary Club meetings were held. Some smart soul had thought to cover over Anderson’s logo with a purple cloth on which these words had been stitched:
JESUS FOR AMERICA
.

I went up to the podium. The crowd filled the huge square completely; all the side streets leading into it were full of people as well. Men, women, and children were leaning out of open windows everywhere, some even standing on the rooftops. A noisy helicopter circled overhead. Police lights flashed on all sides. The press were corralled in their roped-off section, pointing cameras at us. The Poop Safe truck was trying to work its way from the outskirts into the center, a supply of new potties wobbling precariously on the back. Oscar was sitting on the roof of the Hummer with his arms crossed over the top of his knees, and here and there one of Dukey’s biker pals was shoving somebody away from the stage. Zelda had an enormous smile on her face. For the first time in what seemed like a year, she put her arm through mine and squeezed. “I know you’ll be great,” she shouted into my ear … at which point I remembered that I was doing the introduction. And then I was at the podium, holding up my hands to try and bring some measure of quiet to the throng. In front of me stood twenty or thirty microphones.

“Hi,” I said. “Good morning.” The rumble and roar quieted a decibel or two. I held up my hands trying to quiet it further. No luck. People were yelling out things, cheering, weeping. Finally, I just pointed to Jesus with both hands and the crowd went berserk. Here and there I could see skeptics standing alone or in small groups. They were watching, not
cheering, not applauding, not standing up on their tiptoes to get a better glimpse, not wearing crowns of thorns or waving crosses or carrying placards with biblical quotations on them. For a moment I felt a guilty kinship with them.

In response to this new wave of cheering, Jesus did an odd thing. He took a step forward and held up one finger, like an athlete making the claim that his team was at the top of the national rankings. When I turned to look, I thought I could see a glow around him, a subtle shimmering in the air. After letting the cheers and screams go on for a minute or so, he raised both hands, palms forward, and the place quieted immediately.

“We are tired,” I heard myself saying, without having prepared to say it. The words went echoing around the plaza. “We are tired of politics as usual!”

There was a huge roar. I held up my hands, waited, leaned into the mikes, absolutely winging it. “We are tired of war and greed and lies and unfairness, of our great country being divided up into competing factions. As some of you know, I’ve spent eight years reporting the news here, and in those years I’ve met with thousands of ordinary people, and the message I’ve gotten from those people has always been the same: what happened?”

This was true, actually, and I thought it was a decent line, but the crowd didn’t go wild for it the way I’d hoped they would—a few tentative cheers, that was all. For a moment I did not know what else to say, an unusual situation for me in front of a microphone. I closed my eyes, opened them, looked out at the ocean of faces.

“What happened to my city?” I went on. “What happened to my country? What happened to the sense of decency and compassion we used to know? … Well, the Great Spirit I’m about to introduce”—huge cheer here, and it went on and on until Jesus finally held up his hands and silenced them. “The Great Being who is about to speak to you and make what is probably the most important announcement in American political history, … he has come to give us our city back, our country back, our way of life back!” More of the tremendously loud cheering, and a sense
of excited impatience rippled through the crowd and across the stage. “So without making you wait any longer, I give you the next president of these united United States, Jesus Christ!”

I stepped reverently away from the podium, and I can tell you that never before or since have I ever heard anything like the sound that greeted Jesus as he took my place. Utterly deafening. A weird symphony of screams, thousands of voices, whistles, chants, all of it echoing around shabby old Banfield Plaza with its crappy metal-grated storefronts and weedy, now trampled, patches of grass. Stab ran over and hugged me. Zelda gave me a big wet kiss. My mother, tears again running down her cheeks, could not stop nodding, at me, at Jesus, at the crowd. I noticed that Wales and Esmeralda had come up onto the stage. She gave me a lovely smile, and he nodded twice in my direction—about as big a compliment as you’d ever get from the guy.

“Thank you. Thank you all for coming,” Jesus was trying to say, but the thousands of people in Banfield Plaza would not let him speak. For several more minutes they went crazy, and there was a mad pushing and shoving down below us as a few idiots tried to rush the stage. One of the Harleys got knocked over. I saw at least one punch being thrown, and I hoped the ambulances could get through. I worried that Chief Bastatutta would be having a heart attack somewhere on the edges of Wilson Street, trying to keep an open corridor. In fact, I noticed that some of the most attentive listeners and enthusiastic applauders were in police uniform.

“Thank you. Thank you all.” Jesus held up his hands and the crowd soon quieted. “I am going to keep this short. As my good friend Russ Thomas just told you, we are doing something here today that has never been done. I have come to you, come back to you”—another prolonged cheer—“because you are a nation in grave spiritual danger. You are in the process, well into the process, of losing your moral leadership in the world, losing your way in the modern frenzy. What I am offering is not a campaign based on gain, personal or political. There are some of you here who will not necessarily be better off under my leadership, not materially better off, at least. I cannot say I will cut your taxes and raise your salaries. What I can say is that you will have a nation based on kindness
and goodness, not some mere slogan that includes those things, but actual kindness and goodness. You will have a sane, sensible foreign policy based on moral rather than strategic imperatives and founded upon the principle of considering the other as yourself; you will have a country in which children are no longer hungry, and you will live on a planet that is not being ravaged by our greed and stupidity. In the name of my father and mother, the greatest of great spirits, the ones you know in the secret depths of your souls but have been blinded to by the concerns of ordinary life; in the name of the Creator’s Creator, the inventor of time, the great pulse of love that spins the universes, I have come into this humble body, in this humble place, on this troubled planet, to become its most powerful citizen. Here, today, in the city of West Zenith, I, the Son of Man, announce my candidacy for the presidency of the United States of America. And I ask you for your support.”

Forget support. At that moment, the people in that square—Bastatutta later estimated the crowd at sixty thousand—would have given Jesus their lives. It was pure pandemonium. Jesus stepped back from the podium, took my brother’s hand in his left hand, and Zelda’s in his right, and raised them, and you couldn’t have heard a cannon if it had been discharged ten feet away. Wild, it was. Near chaos. We’d arranged for a thousand balloons to be set free, and they were released at that moment, making about as big an impression as one kid blowing bubbles in the stands at Fenway Park. My brother Stab started jumping up and down, holding Jesus’s hand and yelling “Jee-zus! Jee-zus! Jee-zus!” The chant caught on, and it seemed to me that the stage and the sides of the buildings were all shaking, trembling, about to crash to the ground. “Jee-zus! Jee-zus! JEE-ZUS!”