American Savior (17 page)

But I didn’t have to worry. It was Dukey McIntyre who got out and seemed ready to start throwing punches. His very short, rust red hair seemed to be standing up straight on his head, and his arms were held out away from his body as if he were squeezing stale loaves of bread in each armpit on the way home from the Piggly Wiggly. Combat boots.
Flak jacket. The whole nine yards. He must have drunk eight Red Bulls on the flight west. He was striding toward the protesters with a menacing expression on his face and the Scorched Earth logo (our pretty blue planet engulfed in flames) on his shirt. I reached for the door hoping to stop him before he killed someone and had to spend the rest of his life in Leavenworth, but Jesus rested a hand on my arm. He put a finger on the button and rolled the window down.

“Dukey,” he said. “It’s all right.”

“All right?” Dukey screamed above the chanting. His face was almost purple, veins standing out on his forehead and neck. “I’m going to bust some head! I’m going to take one of those signs and start busting some redneck head!”

“But you
are
a redneck,” Esmeralda said, in a voice Dukey could not hear.

“Let me take care of it,” Jesus told him evenly.

Dukey hesitated, glanced at me, his nominal boss. Not knowing what else to do, I nodded. When Jesus got out, I followed bravely and resolutely, though sweat was already running down the insides of my arms. I waved for Stab and Zelda to stay in the car.

Jesus—whose wardrobe was unpredictable—had dressed that day in jeans, work boots, and a striped short-sleeved shirt. He had the powerful shoulders and strong hands of a day laborer, and, with his coppery skin, he looked as if he’d been out in the fields for most of that spring. As he stepped out of the car and walked toward them, the protesters seemed, very quickly, to run out of gas. I don’t believe any kind of divine power was used; it was his presence, an extraordinary presence, but fully human all the same. He walked toward them as calmly as if he were strolling over to buy a glass of lemonade from a kindergartener at a sidewalk stand, and then he stopped a few yards short, put his hands on his hips, and looked at them. One or two people in the back were still yelling, but everyone I could see—and Dukey and I were only a few feet behind Jesus—was quietly watching him. The children seemed especially moved, as if some combination of Barney, an Action-Figure, and the lead singer from the Wiggles had stepped out of the TV set and was about
to give them a present. I noticed a camera crew getting out of a satellite truck and running over. They took up their position at the left side of the crowd, close against the gate, and started filming. “You’re not real, are you?” one brave soul in the front row managed to say, but his voice had a tremor of doubt in it.

“Quite real,” Jesus answered. “Perfectly real.”

“But you’re not the Risen Christ,” a woman ventured, more forcefully.

“It is possible that I am not,” Jesus said, looking straight at her. “But it is possible that I am. And if I am, and if you see me as I am and do not believe, what becomes of you?”

The woman fainted, just lost her legs and dropped. Her husband started to minister to her. The camera swung over to them. A tall, thin young man with a red shirt on pushed hard from the back of the crowd to the front and began thrusting his finger at Jesus and spraying spit. “Fake! Fake! Fake!” he shouted, but the crowd was not taking up the chant any longer. The camera turned to the young man. He stopped yelling and glared.

“I am Jesus, the Christ,” Jesus said, tenderly but surely. “I offer you my blessing and I ask for your vote.”

At this, at the tone of his voice more than the words, I think, three or four protestors in the front row dropped their signs and went down on their knees. About a quarter of the people behind them did the same. The woman who had fainted got up onto all fours and then fainted again and fell flat on her face on the tarmac. I could hear the reporter talking into his microphone, “We’re here at Forbes Field in Topeka, where the man calling himself Jesus has….”

“Let us pass now, if you would,” Jesus went on quietly. “We have a rally today in Veterans’ Park, and we’d like to get to the hotel and prepare. I invite all of you to come to the rally and hear what I have to say about rescuing America.”

One of the elderly women at the edge of the crowd suddenly threw her cane across the metal barrier and shouted, “I’m cured!” Someone else pushed one of the sections of fence aside, and for a moment I thought
there was going to be a wholesale stampede. They were pressing forward, or about three-quarters of them were. There was still a fair-sized minority of nonbelievers hanging back. They had not knelt. They’d lowered their signs and stopped chanting, but the expressions on their faces were thick with disdain. Dukey and I circled around in front of Jesus and held out our arms, hoping he’d hurry back into the limo. Instead, he came forward between us, waded right into the crowd, and started touching people on the shoulder or the top of the head. Some were shivering. At least one of them started speaking in tongues. Jesus crouched down and put his hands on the shoulders of a boy who could not have been more than three, and instead of crying at the sudden attention of this dark-haired stranger, the boy flashed a toothy smile. Naturally, at that point, the reporter pushed his way through, with the cameraman right behind him, thrust the microphone in Jesus’s face and said, “What is your stance on the question of abortion?”

“I have no stance on it,” Jesus said after a moment, looking up from his crouch.

“But is it right or wrong?”

“Right and wrong,” Jesus said calmly.

“But would you appoint justices who’d outlaw the taking of human life in the womb or wouldn’t you?” the reporter pressed.

I could feel myself cringing. I could feel the mood of the crowd swinging back toward where it had been before Jesus had first approached them. The answer to this question, it seemed to me, was going to send the campaign careening in one direction or another, toward the red states or toward the blue, or, possibly, toward a premature end. On this issue, more than any other in American politics, there was no compromise.

“There is God’s law, and the law of the nation,” Jesus said.

I cringed again. I moved toward him, looking for a way to get him safely back into the limo and get us out of there.

“What you’re saying is ‘render unto Caesar,’” a man in the crowd called, taking up the questioning before the reporter could get his next word out. “But what if Caesar allows people to slaughter the unborn?”

“I have come to bring the two laws together,” Jesus said.

“To make murder illegal then,” a woman said hopefully.

“To make unkindness unacceptable,” Jesus said to her. “Anger and hatred and unkindness and greed and selfish behavior of all kinds.” And then, patting the boy’s head a final time, he stood up and turned, and in another minute we were back in the limo with the doors locked and an awful silence floating in the air among us. The driver took us slowly forward through the crowd, which was neatly divided now into those who were waving and smiling and those who were standing still with scowls on their faces. I turned my head as we went through the gates, and I could see the reporter speaking animatedly into the camera, and small arguments already beginning to break out. What did he mean? What kind of political doublespeak was this? He wasn’t a liberal, was he?

After we’d been cruising toward the hotel for a few minutes, Wales, God bless him, had the courage to break apart the terrible quiet that had settled over us. “It’s a question that’s going to haunt you all through the campaign, you know,” he said carefully.

“What is?” Jesus asked him. “The inclination toward universal compassion?”

“You know what I mean. The abortion question. Pro-choice. Pro-life. It’s not a fence you can sit on. Not here especially. But not anywhere really.”

“I’ve been wondering what you wanted me to say to the press about it,” Zelda said. “We’ve all been talking about it.”

“Tell them I will answer any question they ask.”

“But this is the American media,” Wales said. “They don’t want parables, and they don’t want cryptic sayings. They’re going to try to pin you down.”

It was not the finest choice of words. For a second or two, Jesus almost seemed to grin, and then he turned to my brother and said, “Stab, we’re glad you’re here, do you know that?”

My brother smiled his tremendous smile, a smile without any defense in it, any sophistication, any cynicism, any armor. “I’m happy I’m here, too, God,” he said.

“But if you hadn’t been born when you were, to your mom and dad,
with this joker here as your brother, your spirit would have found another way to come to us. Do you understand?”

“Sure I do,” Stab said. “But nobody else would love me like this mom and dad, right? And this brother?”

“Nobody.”

“I knew that was right,” Stab said. “And I know how they made me, too.”

Jesus patted him kindly on the knee. I could feel myself almost leaning toward him, could feel the words climbing up my throat toward my lips. “But say it plain,” I wanted to yell out. “Let us know what you think about it!”

Jesus turned to Zelda. “Let me take care of that answer for now,” he told her, and she was nodding her head in rapid beats.

“But we want to know,” I blurted out. “Is it murder, or is it okay? Or are we going to get into situational ethics? As president, what would you do?”

Wales and Ezzie were murmuring their agreement, so at least I wasn’t left out there hanging.

“I shall teach,” Jesus said. “I shall teach kindness and compassion. That’s what I’ve always done. And it has always made certain people angry and violent.”

“But you’re avoiding the question,” I said. Zelda was nudging me with her leg. I knew I was pushing things, but I could not stop myself.

Jesus looked across the space at me until I became uncomfortable, but I kept my eyes on his eyes.

“You have ultimate freedom in how you behave,” he said at last. “You were given an unlimited freedom to determine your fate. None of you seems to understand that yet.”

“Even so—” I started.

“I understand it,” Stab said, which was the kind of thing he always did, picking up a few words of a complicated conversation and responding with some kind of semi
non sequitur
.

“Your brother here understands it,” Jesus said, boring his eyes into
mine. It wasn’t a look of coldness; it was the definition of direct, though his words had a soft lining to them. “You, on the other hand, are a bit slow.”

“I’ve been telling him that for years,” Wales said, and everyone laughed.

I joined in the laughter, content to let the subject fade away for the time being, but it felt false to me. I had been cast back into the zone of uncertainty again, and I knew Jesus could feel it, and Zelda, too, and I was glad my parents hadn’t been in the car to hear the conversation.

As we were checking into the Topeka Sheraton, Wales waited until no one was near us and said, “That’s going to kill us, that kind of answer. You know that, don’t you?”

I said that I knew it, and then I went upstairs with my good wife-to-be, and we showered and changed clothes and got ready for the rally without saying a word to each other.

TWENTY-TWO

Among the crowd in Veterans’ Park, a number of people were holding up placards with photos of dead fetuses on them, and I was worried that Jesus was going to try to smooth over the abortion issue by talking about something else, or that he would give the kind of evasive answers he’d more or less gotten away with at the airport. I introduced him again. It was easier this time, though I felt the crowd was less sympathetic. It wasn’t only the people with the fetus pictures, and the fruit-heads yelling, “Thank God for the war!” (meaning, we found out later, that they believed God had put America in what was looking more and more like a thirty-year war, as punishment for our tolerance of homosexuals). It wasn’t only the
EVOLUTION IS THE DEVILS DOCTRINE! ADAM AND EVE WERE MADE IN THE FIRST DAY
! crowd (grammatically challenged, as so many of the loudest mouths seemed to be) either, although, as my mother noted, even if you read the Bible literally, Adam and Eve weren’t made until later than that. It wasn’t that the people were unfriendly. In fact, everyone we’d met, from the hotel bellhops to the limo driver to the police officials with whom I’d arranged for security, was friendly and nice. It was just a general sense I had—my own prejudices maybe—standing up in front of the microphones and five or six thousand souls, that this new flat world we were in was less than welcoming to the Jesus candidacy.

So I kept the introduction short and to the point, and then yielded the stage to Jesus. He began more or less the same way he’d begun in West
Zenith, saying America was in grave danger of losing its soul, and that he’d come to spread love and good will again, and so on. But then—perhaps sensing a growing restlessness in the crowd—he surprised me, surprised us all.

“Now I know that the campaign is new,” he said in the same gentle, even-toned way he said almost everything, “and that there are many unanswered questions. As I have said before, I am going to answer every question I am asked, although the answer will not always make everyone comfortable. At the airport today—and I want to thank the good people who were there for making us feel excited about being in Topeka—at the airport today I was asked about abortion.”

He paused and even the fruit-heads fell silent. You could hear crows flying overhead, making their harsh laughing sounds. You could hear skateboard wheels on the nearby sidewalk. Jesus drew the silence out, stood there not saying anything else for ten or fifteen seconds, just looking at the crowd. I was aware, naturally, of all the cameras focused on him, all the dead air time.

He took a breath and started up again. “I understand that it is an issue that divides this great nation, divides brother from sister, father from son, mother from daughter, friend from friend. I understand that. I am aware of that and deeply saddened by it. What is at the heart of this issue? What can we say is the truth at its center?”