American Savior (27 page)

Colonel Alowich had figured out how to laugh in a more pleasing fashion—
unh, unh, unh,
instead of his teeth-revealing
ha! … ha! … ha! —
and that, combined with an energetic tour of the Northeast and a new proposal for improving public schools, had brought him back into a near dead heat for second. Unfortunately for him, he had hired disgraced advisors from the Dukakis and Kerry campaigns, and their advice was not always sound under pressure. In a blatant attempt to court the
Ultimate
Fighting
vote, for instance, they sent Alowich moose hunting in Maine, even though he had not been known to have hunted since one weekend trip with his dad, in third grade. His campaign ran a spot showing him with a shotgun over his shoulder, a deep voice in the background intoning: “The
man
to keep America safe and strong!”

Maplewith’s media people were not much more sophisticated.

Her officially sanctioned (“Hi, I’m Margie Maplewith and I approve this ad”) effort was somewhat more decent than an unofficial ad, later attributed to her people, that showed a Jesus look-alike in drag, and played well in parts of Utah. The more widely circulated spot showed, in fast sequence, shaggy-headed antiwar protestors carrying signs that said
ENDLESS
!, racy scenes from a
Girls Gone Wild
segment on late-night cable TV, men in turbans shouting, “Down with America!” (in English, strangely enough), all of which, she seemed to be implying, were Jesus’s fault. He was shown in a still photo with his mouth open and his usually neat hair wind-blown and unruly. And then, much more slowly, and accompanied by John Philip Sousa music, the candidate herself came striding onto the stage of a small-town rally at which everyone was white and hundreds of flags were waving. The camera panned to a young girl in the front of the crowd, blonde and ecstatic, and then the announcer was heard asking: “Would you trust your children to be cared for by someone you don’t know? Someone who comes suddenly on the scene claiming to be good and pure? Someone who won’t commit to belonging to one party, one religion, or even to one gender? Someone who hasn’t spent his life in the United States of America but has wandered around doing things that cannot be verified? Or would you put their future in the hands of someone who has built a business, stayed true to her faith, served in the halls of Congress, a woman who has raised two fine children of her own in a stable, lasting marriage, and fought for the well being of families for thirty years? Now, and on Election Day, the choice is clear: Maplewith for president!”

But everything they did had the scent of staleness to it. The American voters (and just as important, for our purposes, the American news media) had seen candidates giving speeches, shaking hands, leveling charges,
talking technicalities, slinging slogans. What they had never seen before was a candidate who spent a whole precious morning hiking with three environmental engineers in the Cascades, or wielding a hammer—not for ten minutes, but for six hours—at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in northern Oregon, where new houses were being built to replace those damaged in a mudslide. Jesus took a yoga class in Portland, went into nursing homes and gave speeches sitting in a wheelchair so he could “know what it felt like.” He had an apparently unlimited store of original ideas and, on that West Coast swing, he put them out on the table for us to accept or reject. And we accepted most of them, and watched the money and the endorsements pour in.

Working on a political campaign can be tremendously seductive. When it’s going well, it is a thrill like almost no other, and through the last part of that summer it went very well for us. I remember one night, after a particularly large rally, when Zelda and I lay in bed unable to sleep. “It’s like people are doing a transference,” she said. “They’re projecting onto him an idealized version of their father, or themselves. And I feel like some of that is rubbing off on us, don’t you, Russ?”

My mother had a slightly different take on the whole thing. At one point, after Jesus had gone kayaking on the Columbia River near a place called Chenoweth, she and I went for a stroll along the bank there, and she said, “Being around him makes me feel like I feel right after confession. It’s like all your sins have been forgiven.”

“I don’t picture you having a lot of sins to forgive, Ma,” I told her.

“Marrying out of the church?” she said, in a pained voice. “Being late for mass all the time, in the early days, because of your father’s … romantic advances.”

She started to go on with the list, but I saw a small opening and stopped her. “I think Jesus is trying to say that the church, you know, well, it’s a big church. Big door. Anybody can walk in, and the rules aren’t as important as, I don’t know, loving your husband, for example.”

She did not argue the point, which astonished me. I took it as a good sign.

THIRTY-ONE

We reached Seattle in late September, and we had three straightforward rallies there in two days—no surfing, no book discussions, no bull-riding or hiking or wheelchair rides—and huge police protection at all of them. The good will in California and Oregon had, I suppose, taken the edge off my paranoia. We were feeling the love, as Enrica Dominique put it, when, having taken a leave of absence from WZIZ, she joined us at the Seattle airport and saw how happy we looked. Enough time had passed since my brother’s teary talk about Jesus being shot that I no longer worried about it night and day. Still, I want to go on record as saying I did not slack up on the protection of the candidate. I had tried and tried to get him to wear a bulletproof vest and to have more indoor rallies, but he steadfastly refused. He did not mind the police around him, he said, but under no circumstances would he say yes to having his own Secret Service detail until the election was over. Given those restrictions, I did everything I could.

Randy Zillins called again on our second morning in Seattle. I had not heard from him since our lilies of the field conversation. “Just want to let you know I went down to the Jesus headquarters in town and the place was mobbed,” he said. “I still can’t believe how many people are buying this act.”

“What if it isn’t an act, R.Z.? Then what?”

“Then I burn forever, man,” he said, and when I hung up a few sentences later, I felt like I should take a shower, or have a stiff drink to wash the sound of him out of my soul.

The third and last of the Seattle rallies was an outdoor event held in light rain in a park in a particularly liberal suburb called Westonborough. The crowd was friendly and enthusiastic. Jesus finished his speech with a not-very-good Elvis imitation that made people smile, and then he walked around in front of the podium holding the microphone. He was getting ready to take the first question when there was a disturbance in the front of the crowd, the kind of thing we hadn’t seen since Kansas. Someone there was shoving people and shouting—all I could make out was the phrase “the true lord!”—but it would turn out that this was a feint. My attention went to the shouting and shoving, as did that of the police: several officers moved toward the heckler, who slipped away.

In the midst of this planned distraction, shots were fired from the roof of a three-story building to Jesus’s right.

The first bullet missed him and plowed into the wooden stage about six feet to his left. The second grazed the flesh at the back of his neck, below his right ear, missed his spinal column by an eighth of an inch, and cut through the back of his left shoulder before ricocheting off the metal stair rail and breaking the window of a police car parked forty yards away. It was, after about one second of paralysis, as if someone had pushed a pandemonium button. People screamed and stampeded toward the park exits, police pointed toward the rooftop, drawing their weapons, yelling into their radios.

It took me two seconds to react. I’d been distracted by the shouting lunatic in the crowd, and then I hestitated, not wanting to knock Jesus over again for no reason. I heard the second bullet make a strange sound—
tink!
—when it hit the railing, and I looked up and saw Jesus stagger sideways and then catch his balance and go down on one knee. A patch of blood sprouted on the back of his sport jacket. I was next to him in the time it would take you to say “goddammit.” Wales and two policemen had the same instinct. Two more seconds and we had Jesus on the floor of the stage, covering him with our bodies. Somebody, possibly me, was yelling, “He’s hit! He’s hit!” We pulled his jacket off, which wasn’t easy with the jostling and screaming. In the confusion I was pushed flat onto the stage so that my face was near his, and I saw the strangest other-worldly
calm in his eyes. You would have thought he’d just awakened from an afternoon nap and was checking the bedside clock to see how much time there was before he had to be at his friend’s house for cocktails. One officer was ripping open the back of his shirt, the other was pressing a hand against the neck wound—I remember that the fingers looked slippery with blood. But Jesus just gazed at me with those bottomless brown eyes and said, very quietly, “I’m fine, Russ.”

“You don’t look fine. You’re white as a ghost.”

“More votes that way,” he joked, before he lost consciousness.

Six or eight state troopers had formed a sort of wall behind him, standing between his prone body and the place where the shots had come from. It started to rain harder. A doctor rushed up from the crowd. She was an Asian woman of middle age—a pediatrician, but no one cared; a doctor was a doctor at that point. She looked at both wounds and told us not to move his neck, not to press too hard on the spinal cord. And then the ambulance was pushing through the crowd and attendants were up on the stage, and drawn guns were everywhere, amidst the screaming and police radios and sirens. Only one person from the campaign was allowed to get in the ambulance with Jesus; I was that person. I had time enough for one quick look over my shoulder as I trotted beside the stretcher. Zelda and my parents were standing out in the middle of the stage, soaking wet and traumatized, trying to get my brother up off his knees. And then we were racing toward Swedish Hospital with a police escort front and back, and Jesus was either dead, unconscious, or so deep in meditation that no one could reach him. The ambulance attendant had started an IV. “He has a pulse,” she told me after about sixty seconds.

I found myself praying. I could not remember the last time I had said a real prayer, and I did not know exactly who I was praying to, but I was saying, “Please let him live,” under my breath. “Please let him stay alive.”

At the hospital, attendants wheeled him toward the emergency room between rows of photographers, cameras flashing, reporters screaming out questions as if the first priority at that moment was to make sure they got their story. In the examination room, a nurse pulled a curtain around the bed, and two doctors went to work. I wouldn’t let them kick me out,
and a few minutes later, when Stab arrived, I wouldn’t let them kick him out either. He was bubbling one prayer after the next, “Hail Mary fulled of God, God loves you. He loves you and among all women and the fruit of your wound.”

Much later on, Jesus would tell Stab it was his prayers that had brought him back down from heaven, and some of us would believe that, and some of us would not.

Fourteen long minutes passed before Jesus opened his eyes. There were all kinds of machines hooked up to him, doctors painstakingly cleaning the wounds, checking monitors, sending things through the IV, taking X-rays of his upper spine. At the sight of Jesus’s lids raising, Stab stopped praying and started jumping up and down. With his big belly, the medicine bottles on the table were shaking so much the doctors finally made us get out. We retreated a short distance to an anteroom off the main waiting area and stood there with Zelda and Mom and Dad, Wales and Dukey and Enrica Dominique. “Why, why, why, why, why?” my mother kept saying.

“He’s going to be okay, Ma. Stab, don’t worry, he’s going to be all right.”

“They shot God!” he said in a furious tone. “Somebody shot a bullet at
God!
”

The emergency room was crawling with police, the pavement outside the door jammed with reporters, the parking lot beyond them packed with people praying and crying. My cell phone rang. I stepped into a small office to answer. It was the assistant chief of the Seattle Police Department. “We caught the bastard,” he said.

The doctors sewed Jesus back together with twenty-three stitches, started him on an antibiotic to prevent the wounds from becoming infected, pumped blood into him to replace the large amount he’d lost, and made him lie there for hours, while news flashed around the world that someone had tried to kill him.

After a time, Zelda went out and spoke to the assembled press corps. She gave them the facts: Jesus’s condition was good; unless there was an infection or some damage the doctors had not seen, he’d be released the
next day and, barring complications, would resume his regular campaign schedule later in the week. The shooter had fled on foot and been caught in a Starbucks men’s room. He called himself a “true, living Christian,” and was a member of a radical church with a few thousand members, spread out mainly across the Northwest. The Temples of the Devoted Angels of Judea it was called, and the shooter had been working in concert with the fellow who created the disturbance in front of the stage—and who had so far eluded arrest.

We stayed in the waiting area a long time, sitting around in hospital chairs drinking coffee and trying to settle ourselves. Experiencing something like that is a strange combination of the familiar and the surreal, as if part of you has already been through it or you have seen it on the screen a thousand times. Another part of you can’t believe it has happened.

My father seemed particularly affected. “Maniacs,” he kept saying. “Idiots.” He hadn’t smoked in twenty years, but I could tell from the fidgety movement of his strong hands that he wanted a cigarette then.

“They don’t like him claiming to be God,” I told him, my own voice jittery. “They have the monopoly on God. They know who he is, what he looks like, how he would act, how he would vote, what he would think about sex, taxes, guns, and hunting.”