American Savior (37 page)

“No freakin’ way we would’ve let you go,” Dukey yelled. I noticed that, since he’d seen Jesus washing my mother’s feet, he’d been touching Ada almost continuously. This was rare for him. Though I don’t think he was mean to her, there was almost no public tenderness between them, not in touch or words, and not much either between Dukey and his son. It would have been too much of a risk for him, doing that and letting people see. It would have been the psychological equivalent of walking around without his flak jacket on. Now, suddenly, he had an arm around Ada and was massaging her shoulder with the fingers of one hand. She looked like she was being fondled by an alien. So maybe Jesus had sent them a message, too.

“Exactly,” Jesus told him. “You would have tried to stop me.”

“At least you should have let some of the guys go down there with you. Safety’s sake.”

Jesus smiled at him, indulgently, I thought.

The Simmeltons wanted to pick up the tab, but Jesus wouldn’t let them. He produced a roll of bills from his pants pocket and pushed it into the hands of the host, who bowed to him as he went out the front door.

In the limousine convoy on the way home, we were sitting in our usual positions, Zelda and I across from Jesus and Stab. I could feel Jesus looking at me, but I kept my eyes turned away. I was trying to figure out what had happened, what he had actually told us, if he had promised us anything, if my intuition was on target or way off. I tried to catch Zelda’s eye, but she was talking to a reporter on the phone, trying to smooth over her candidate’s earlier no-show.

There was a dark stretch of highway, the exit ramp, and then I watched the bleak city of West Zenith roll into view, the storefronts with sheets of metal covering their windows, the shadowy alleys, the street people huddled in blankets in doorways, the idling cars and young men avoiding the light. I thought about what Jesus had said to me once: earth was the dimension of pain. I thought about Wales, on the beach in San Diego, saying we had to learn to say yes to everything.

When we pulled up to the hotel, Zelda stepped out, and then Stab. For a moment Jesus and I were left alone in the backseat. I motioned for him to go first, and I was able then to meet his eyes. He looked at me, looked into me again, put his hand on my knee and said one word.

“Courage.”

V
ERY LATE THAT NIGHT
, when we felt we’d done everything we could to prepare for voting day, Zelda and I lay beside each other beneath the sheets of the hotel bed, warm skin against warm skin. Neither of us could sleep. Neither of us had said a word about what had happened that evening in the Taj Mahal. As if to avoid talking about it, we’d sat up in our room watching TV until almost two a.m. The pundits were predicting that, despite his election eve antics, Jesus was still favored to win the popular vote, perhaps by as much as five percent, but the electoral college was absolutely uncertain. Alowich was probably out of it, but Maplewith might have the edge over Jesus, depending on how things played out in half a dozen key states.

“You can’t sleep either, right?” Zelda asked quietly in the darkness.

“Not even close.”

“You know what I wish, Russ?”

“What?”

“I wish we were able to not worry. I wish we could have the attitude that, no matter what happens tomorrow, we’ve been privileged to do this, to be around him, to meet the people we’ve met in the last few months. I’d like it if we could just be grateful for that, whether we win or lose or … no matter what. Before he came into our lives we were doing pretty well … I was happy, you were happy … but I feel like a whole other dimension
of ourselves has been opened up now. Look at how much he’s given us, each one of us. And what did we do to deserve it? Nothing, really.”

For a moment or two I lay there without speaking. I could hear the elevator doors closing in the hallway, the faint sound of a siren in the street below. I could feel the warmth of Zelda’s leg against my skin.

“Do you ever wonder,” I asked her, “why he came to us? I mean, look at it: me, my mom, my dad, Dukey McIntyre, for God’s sake. We’re not exactly the twelve apostles and Mary Magdalene. Jesus coming to West Zenith, to be with a pack of jokers like us! Don’t you ever wonder?”

“He had to pick someplace. He had to choose some people.”

“I know, but it’s not like we’re particularly holy or smart or that we’ve done some great work in our lives.”

“Your dad was brave in the war. He and your mom raised Stab with a lot of love. You went through what you went through with Esther and you didn’t turn permanently bitter. The Simmeltons grew up in the New York equivalent of Hunter Town, and somehow worked themselves out of that, and they’ve given away millions to good causes.”

“Right. And you were raised in foster homes and have spent your life since then helping people, and you put up with a guy like me. I know. But—”

“We’ve all lived good lives,” she said quietly. “We’ve all been heroic, in an ordinary kind of way.”

“Still … look at Wales, I mean. The guy watches football on Sundays with a glass of vodka in his hand. He goes fishing on summer weekends. He’s not exactly, you know, John the Baptist—”

“Maybe Jesus doesn’t want us to see people that way. Think about it. On the last day of his campaign he went and played football with those boys, and had his picture taken with them. Most people look at boys like that and without even knowing them think: gang members, criminals, people you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Most people look at your brother and immediately turn away, or they see him as an idiot who can’t be quiet when he should be, who has no real understanding of life. With Stab, at least, you see beyond the surfaces and so do I. Maybe Jesus is trying to show us he does that with everybody, looks past the exterior
to something perfect inside. Maybe that’s what he’s trying to teach us, and if he’s president….”

Zelda stopped abruptly.

“I can only do that with very little kids,” I said, in a joking tone, because with the way she’d stopped after the words “
if he’s president,
” something cold had blown into the room again. “Babies, little kids. After they get to be about two, I start to see what’s wrong with them. Even with somebody I love, even with you—no offense—I can see that perfect part about one minute out of every hundred. I see it in myself about one day out of every two years, and as I get older I see it less and less. Today, when he disappeared, I sneaked down to the Wee Drop Inn for two hours and sat there drinking and watching TV, and I was so mad I stopped believing there was even anything good in him, never mind that he might be, you know, that he might be—”

“Sent from God,” she said.

“Exactly.”

After a while, Zelda turned onto her side and rested her cheek against my shoulder. “When I had my practice I often used to wonder what it was that made everybody hate themselves so much. Or not hate themselves maybe but have such a low opinion of themselves, as if there was a perfect standard they’d been told they were supposed to live up to, bodywise, brainwise, as parents, as lovers, as children. Sometimes I thought we had it upside down: we believed we had to be good so that we could love ourselves, instead of naturally loving ourselves and then naturally doing good because we loved ourselves.”

“You lost me,” I said.

“Every once in a while on this trip I’d see somebody—a waitress or a driver or someone in the crowd—remember the man who sold us those flowers in Chico?—and there would be an expression on their face.… It was as if, when they looked at Jesus they were seeing themselves, as if he were the manifestation of how they felt about themselves, deep inside. I think they’ve come to a place where they are perfectly at peace with their humanness.

“My mother says that, when she comes out of confession on Saturday afternoon, she feels holy. Is that what you mean?”

“I bet there is no way on earth your mother can be unkind to anyone or do anything hurtful while she is in that state of mind. She believes her sins are forgiven, really believes it, so she can forgive everyone else.”

“Even my dad … for a few hours.”

“I think Jesus has been trying to teach us something about that during this whole thing—the talks, the tricks he played, the courage, the calm, the warmth, the insistence on kindness, the turning our assumptions upside down. Disappearing today. Even that foot washing at dinner tonight. It’s all been one big lesson.”

I thought about that for a minute, feeling her skin against mine, and then the darkness and coldness beyond that. I thought about my father insisting on using the word
rabbi
or
teacher,
instead of
God.
And then I thought of the last thing Jesus had said to me before he got out of the limo. The foreboding that had been at the back of my mind circled around and around and then pushed itself out into the air: “He’s going to be killed, isn’t he,” I said.

“I think so.”

“And we’re going to have to deal with that, and deal with the country we have, without him.”

“Yes.” Zelda reached her face up and kissed me, and we were silent after that for a long time, and eventually we fell asleep that way, holding on.

FORTY-ONE

The TV networks have this cute thing they do on Election Day. They get information from their own exit polls, people stationed at key precincts who ask certain questions of voters after the deed is done. To the networks’ credit, while the polls are still open, they hold themselves back from making projections based on this information. Once the polls close within a particular time zone or an individual state, the fun begins. When that happens, it sounds something like this: “ABC news is now able to project that Mickey Mouse will carry the state of Florida. So Florida, with its twenty-seven electoral votes, goes into the Mouse column.” And so on.

What’s interesting to me as a journalist is what they do before these projections can be made. Inevitably, they trot out some second-tier reporter, and give her a four-minute segment during which she can talk about the answers voters have given at the polling place. These answers can’t be anything as direct as who they actually voted for—it’s too early for that to be allowed on air—so they fall into the category of shocking conclusions like: “We found that voters who describe themselves as ‘very religious’ generally placed ‘values issues’ above foreign policy strength.” Or, “Our research has demonstrated that women aged twenty-five to forty, living in the suburbs, with between one and three children, whose husbands earn more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, who prefer to buy cars made by American companies, and who favor pantsuits when they go to the office, these women said, overwhelmingly, that environmental issues have gotten too much play in this election cycle.”

In order to guess who is doing well and who isn’t, you have to be able to read the code, get between the lines of this stuff. You have to know which parties are considered stronger on national defense or environmental issues in any given election cycle; which candidates said what about gun control, birth control, mind control. If you listen carefully, say, around six p.m., you can start to get an idea what the actual returns will look like.

As a former media insider, I am usually pretty good at reading this code. However, this time around there was a big wrinkle: precincts that, in the past, had been statistically predictable, had now been rendered statistically insignificant by the new candidate. There had never before been a holy man in the race. If you judged by what Jesus had said during the campaign, you’d have a hard time locking him into either camp. He’d accomplished the seemingly impossible: he’d made half the electorate into swing voters.

So, though we sat (or, in my case, paced) around the twelfth-floor hotel suite most of the day, watching the news channels, and though we had supporters calling us from various parts of the country telling us what their own exit polling was telling them (that turnout was particularly high, for one thing), and giving us suggestive information here and there, as the afternoon and then the evening wore on, we were as confused and concerned as everyone else. A lot of pizza was consumed on the twelfth floor that day. A lot of doughnuts. A lot of chicken wings, spare ribs, and so-so sushi. A lot of coffee and Busch Lite and Coke. Between waiting for the results and worrying about the previous night’s conversation with Zelda, I felt like I was sitting on the edge of a twelve-story razor blade, getting fatter by the second. A breeze would come from this direction and I’d almost fall over one way. A breeze from the other direction half an hour later, and I’d be holding tight to keep from falling off the other way. The longer I sat there, the deeper it cut.

We all handled this unbearable tension in our own fashion. Every hour or so my father went out and sprinted the length of the corridor (“You’re going to have a heart attack, Arnie!” my mother yelled each time), returning to the room red-faced and sweating, cradling the small cast on his broken hand, and heading for the beer cooler. When she wasn’t yelling at him, my mom was praying the rosary. Stab got very
loud—so loud that we sent him down to the lobby to pay for every new food delivery. Dukey walked around and around outside the hotel with a pistol in a holster under his vest, no gloves on—though it was not far above freezing that day in Massachusetts—no hat, a few biker pals taking turns keeping him company. Norman Simmelton read sections from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night
to his wife, who had put herself in charge of Web watching on her laptop. Dukey Junior watched Barney videos over and over on a small TV we had set up in a corner of the main room. Amelia acted more or less as babysitter. Ada Montpelier restarted the Barney DVDs, warmed the pizza, poured the coffee, and from time to time would stand at the window to see if she could catch a glimpse of her restless mate. Enrica took up a position in the hall. When I went to check on her I saw that she was trying to kick out the light fixture on the ceiling and coming alarmingly close. Wales took notes, chewed two cigars in half, and covered pages of paper with various combinations of states that would carry us over the 270 electoral vote mark. Esmeralda was glued to the TV set, leaning forward, elbows on knees, relaying everything that had even the smallest significance. “Huge turnout in Utah!” she’d announce, and somebody in the room would grunt or let out a syllable of surprise or a Bronx cheer. “Maplewith’s husband is standing on a corner in Boise giving out free Bibles!”