“Yeah, it sure is, sure is, sure is!” Stab told him, and then, “What is it, Russ? What … what … what … what.… What happened?”
“Jesus is doing great in the polls, pal.”
“Super duper! What are the polls?”
“It’s a thing where people go around asking other people who they think they’re going to vote for. And a lot of people said they’re going to vote for Jesus.”
“Why aren’t they all going to vote for him, Russ?”
“Because they all don’t know him yet. That’s why we have to drive around like this and fly in the plane and everything.”
“Okay, great then. Great, Ma, huh? Pa, isn’t it great?”
In a while, Amelia Simmelton and the little McIntyre-Montpelier boy were in their beds in other rooms, and Ada Montpelier, tired out by her three-year-old and still nursing sore ankles, had gone to lie down, too. We had watched the news reports and the analysis, full, as always, of war imagery: “Well, it’s early, of course, but it would certainly seem that the campaign of the man who calls himself Jesus has gotten traction and is going into the trenches with the better-knowns.” “Yes, but traction where, is the question.” “Right, and, of course, what we’re seeing is mainly the novelty factor. The other candidates have been out there pressing the flesh for eighteen months. They’ve survived the primary battles, taken some blows, licked some wounds. People are weary of them.” “The fatigue factor, yes.” “We’ve seen third parties come and go over the years, haven’t we.” “And it’s a stretch to call this a party.” And so on.
We had gone through two six-packs of Busch Lite (alas, Dukey was the beer buyer for the group and considered local ales and foreign lagers to be unpatriotic), and a bushel of burritos, tortilla chips, a nice spicy salsa, and four gallons of ice cream. With the possible exception of Jesus, who took short naps when we flew but otherwise never seemed to tire, we were all, I think, weary from the travel, from the strain of the rallies. We were starting to understand that we were too small a crew to be carrying on something like this. We couldn’t even begin to field all the phone calls that were coming in on the half-dozen new cell phones we’d registered. Zelda was up late every night trying to deal with requests for interviews. Wales and Nadine Simmelton had set up a Web site, and there were contributions and offers from volunteers pouring in, and a small paid staff in the headquarters back in West Zenith; still we couldn’t come close to doing what had to be done. Yet Jesus insisted that he did not want to hire a big staff, that he wanted to go along the way we were going, generating publicity “the old-fashioned way,” as he called it—i.e., working ourselves to the bone. If people wanted to set up their own local chapters of the campaign, he said, they were free to do so. We had even gotten two feelers from high-priced political operatives, guys who’d worked on presidential campaigns in the past, one on either side of the aisle. Jesus had instructed Wales to respond with polite no-thank-yous.
So there we were in the Wagon Wheel Inn’s only largish room—Jesus, Stab, Ma and Pa, Wales and Ezzie, Dukey, the Simmeltons, Zelda and yours truly—reveling in the news that, after being on the road for only a couple of weeks, we were in contention. It was exciting, I have to tell you. Exciting like nothing else I had ever known. Scary, too. Especially when, after downing the last sip of his wine, Jesus said, “Now they are going to come after us.”
“Who and how?” Ezzie asked him. The woman was as sharp as a sewing needle, and unfailingly gracious. Over the past few weeks, Zelda and I had come to adore her, and to have, I must say, a greater admiration for Wales.
“Listen,” Jesus said, as if we weren’t already doing that. “Put yourselves in the places of the people who work for our fellow candidates. If their candidate gets in, they will have a good job for four years—secretary of state or head of Parks and Forestry or some such thing. Not to mention Alowich and Maplewith themselves, and their running mates, all of whom claim they are in this to help the country, but are, in fact, absolutely bursting with ambition and eager to be the center of international attention. They’re in a hotel room just as we are, somewhere on the American road, looking at those same numbers. What do you think they’re feeling?”
“A desperate panic,” Zelda suggested.
“Exactly. And what do people do when they panic?”
Dukey, who could rarely contain himself in any situation, and who seemed, not without reason, perpetually flattered to be invited to participate in these discussions, burst out, “They shit their pants, is what they do.”
“My thought exactly,” Jesus said, which plastered a big smile onto Dukey’s face. “And then what?”
“Then—” Dukey pursed his lips as if he’d eaten something sour. He plucked at one red sideburn.
“Then they go vicious on us,” Wales said. “Then they go vicious.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Walesy was correct, and it did not take long for the viciousness to erupt, like a burst of swamp-gas from stepped-on marshy muck. Within twenty-four hours, some of the right-wing blogs had posted a photograph of Jesus and my brother Stab. They were embracing, and from the angle of the picture it looked like they might be kissing. In the photo, you couldn’t see that Stab had a face and head built in a different way than we consider normal. The photo quickly made the Internet rounds. The Washington Times ran it on their front page with this caption: SO-CALLED JESUS CANDIDATE REVEALED TO BE GAY. FORMER HOMOSEXUAL LOVER ADMITS TO FIVE-MONTH AFFAIR.
Zelda, whose responsibility it was to keep tabs on press coverage of the campaign, saw the story first and showed it to me in private. My initial response was a personal one: fury. Stab had preserved a lovable innocence into his midtwenties, and I hated to see that tampered with. I hated the thought of having to break the news that there were people in the world who told lies at the expense of others. People so convinced they had the approval of God that anything they did was justifiable.
Soon we started getting phone calls from the press, asking for verification or denial. In her best don’t-mess-with-me voice, Zelda told them that the young man in the photograph was her fiancé’s brother, who had Down syndrome and a special attachment to Jesus. But in the course of talking with those representatives of the press, she learned that the bloggers had used Stab’s photo only as illustration. The character who claimed to have had this relationship with Jesus was from Vermont, had already been booked on one of the right-side radio talk shows, and was being invited onto all the major TV networks, both conservative and liberal. Johnston V. Paege Jr. was his name.
We were in northern New Mexico at this point, at a motel that made the Wagon Wheel look like a Hyatt (all the decent accommodations in the area were booked by the time we called; a big rodeo was going on), and about to start another day of appearances, and I knew the question was going to be thrown at us from the first moment. “Seen this?” I said, showing Wales the computer screen version of the Washington Times story.
He looked at it for about two seconds, then turned his eyes away. “Nice,” he said, bitterly. He was facing out the motel window. “They used to do that to me before I got married. Reminds you of ninth grade. I’ll talk to him about it.”
“Brings up a larger question, Boss.”
“That he’s got no past,” Wales said.
“Exactly. Zelda’s been getting a ton of requests for biographical information, and we have nothing to give the vultures, no résumé, no place of birth, no known relatives.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“We’re due at the West Edfort Rodeo in two hours. Press is going to be there.”
“See if you can find a way to keep your brother otherwise occupied, just for today.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks.”
“For what?’
“Nothing. Forget I said it.”
Norman Simmelton and his wife Nadine were big horse people, and Amelia had ridden, too, before she’d fallen ill. And my dad had ridden at a Jewish camp in the Poconos as a boy. Stab had been i
n the saddle a few times over the years and liked it, so I made a couple of calls and arranged for the five of them to do an easy half-day trail ride up into the foothills. “Sooner or later we’ll have to tell him what’s going on,” I said to my father, “but if we can put most of the fire out by the time you get back, it might be something we can ignore.”
My father was combusting. When he got angry, he had a habit of squeezing things in his bricklayer’s hands—beer cans, baseballs, sheets of paper, articles of clothing—and, as he looked through the blogs, he was compressing a paper coffee cup down to the size of a pea. “It’s the damn Christians doing this,” he said, between his teeth. “The goyim. You see what I’ve been up against all these years, Russ?”
“Arnie, calm yourself,” my mother said.
“Easy for you to say.”
“Pa, I don’t think it’s a Christian-Jewish issue this time. They’re just afraid of Jesus’s surge in the polls and are trying to swiftboat him. You know, a knockout punch. Dean’s scream, Dukakis on the tank, Muskie getting teary-eyed, Kerry claiming to be in Vietnam getting shot at when he was actually in college going to parties and skipping his ROTC meetings—that type of thing.”
“It’s that Carl Jove,” my dad said. “The goyim.”
“Pa, our candidate is the original goy.”
“Says who? He told me he was a Jew.”
“Says the Bible,” my mother said.
“Your half of the Bible, Mudgie, not mine.”
“There’s only one Bible. There’s only one God.”
They started in along the usual lines, but after a few minutes of squeezing various objects down to the size of single molecules, my dad started to back off, his anger worn down by my mother’s certainties. Mudgie might not be as forceful, but she could go on, and on, and on, and on, saying the same thing in the same tone of voice until you’d do anything to get her to stop. It’s in the Bible. There’s only one God. It’s in the Bible. There’s only one God. It’s in the Bible.… So Arnie soon surrendered, stopped talking entirely, and went off with my brother and the Simmeltons to trot and canter.
Meanwhile, Zelda and I, along with Dukey and Ada, were trying to keep ourselves busy in the adjoining room, waiting for Wales and Jesus to emerge. A couple of things were going on. First, like Wales, Zelda and I worried about the lack of a past. We knew it would have to be straightened out soon—Jesus would have to tell how he’d been born in a stable in Kentucky, or a penthouse in Manhattan, or a log cabin in Alaska, something, anything, and fill us in on how he’d gotten from there to here. We’d tried to talk to him about it on several occasions, and he’d given us only the bits about playing football in Kansas and studying dance for awhile. Now it worried us. What had he been up to all these years? It was, Wales quipped in an unguarded moment, the greatest story never told.
Second problem: Dukey McIntyre seemed to be taking the charges personally.
“They’re saying he’s a fag?” he yelled, pacing rapidly back and forth across the room and glancing in what he thought was a surreptitious way at Ada. “That I’m working for a fag? That the guy who saved my little boy’s life is a faggot? That God’s a freaking queer!”
“Dukey, relax,” I said. “And the word you are using, believe it or not, would be offensive to some people who might vote for us.”
“What word?”
“Look, they’re going to say all kinds of things about Jesus. This is only the beginning.”
Dukey seemed profoundly puzzled. In his own rough way he was almost as innocent as my brother. “Where I come from we mess people up, big-time, for saying stuff like that.”
“I know. Where you come from is where I come from. But we have to handle this professionally.”
“I’ll handle it professionally,” he said, glancing at the mother of his child. “I’ll find them and I’ll mess them up like a professional. Big-time.”
At this happy moment, my cell phone buzzed and rang. I dug it out of my pocket and flipped it open, only to have the moment made even happier by the sound of Randy Zillins’s squealy voice in my ear.
“Russ, how goes it?”
“You’ve seen the polls. It’s going good.”
“Sure, sure. But I’m calling about this other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“You know, the gay thing.”
“You didn’t call me when Yansman-Carver came out.”
“Yeah, I know. Been super busy. But what about this one? It looks bad, I’ll tell ya. Can you give me a quote, a little inside info or something?”
“We’ll be making a statement, later today.”
“I know, right. But can’t you give me nothin, buddy?”
“Nothing official, Randy. Nothing for the record.”
“But off the record. Looks bad, don’t it?”
“Off the record,” I said, “a piece of advice. One journalist to another.”
“What?” he asked excitedly.
“Consider the lilies of the field,” I said, and I hung up.
I’m not sure what, exactly, I meant by that. It was one of the few biblical lines I remembered from my Sunday school days, and I was nervous then, and anxious to get him off the phone. Randy wasn’t sure what I meant either: I found out later that the conversation convinced him I would turn out to be some kind of Deep Throat, the inside source that was going to provide his big scoop, his ticket into the farther orbits of journalistic renown. Months later, I would learn that he’d made notes after our conversation, and written: Some kind of code? Lily=gay sex term? in his reporter’s notebook.
As I pocketed the phone, Wales came out of the inner room looking like he’d just seen someone die in a car accident. He slouched in one of the armchairs, and all of us except Dukey sat in a rough circle around him on the two couches and other chairs. Dukey paced. “He won’t deny it,” Wales said.
“What!” Dukey yelled. “What the hell!”
At that moment I wouldn’t have put it past him to grab Ada by the hand, hoist Dukey Junior onto his shoulders, and walk through the door and out of the campaign forever.
“Calm down,” Wales said to him, “or I’ll send you home.”
“Send me home?” Dukey yelled. “I don’t work for you. I work for him!” He pointed at me.
“I’ll send you home, too,” I said. “Let him finish.”
Dukey fumed and spat air for a moment and paced near the windows, but he kept quiet.
“He won’t deny the report,” Wales repeated. “It isn’t true. He told me himself it wasn’t true. He’s never heard of Johnston V. Paege Jr., but he won’t issue a public denial.”
“Why not?”
“He won’t dignify the remark.”
“We’re sunk then,” I said. “When’s the last time America elected a male homosexual to its highest office.”
“Or a female homosexual, for that matter,” Zelda said. “Or anybody besides a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male.”
“John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” my mother chipped in.
“The larger issue is his lack of a past,” Ezzie told her husband.
Wales was nodding, looking at his hands. “We covered that.”
“And?”
“And he’s planning to give a full accounting of his past at the rally today. After the rodeo. All he said was, ‘They asked, and they shall receive.’ I didn’t want to push him.”
“A lot of people in Fultonville said he looked familiar,” Ada put in meekly.
“A lot of people everywhere have said that,” Wales reminded her. “Thousands, probably tens of thousands of people, think he looks like someone they know. To my eye, for example, he looks like the young Jackson Browne, a shade or two darker.”
“Who?” Dukey shouted. We ignored him.
“But no one has claimed to have had an affair with him before this,” I said.
“Not true,” Wales fiddled with the pocket flap of his expensive sport-coat. “We have four different women from four different cit
ies in California. We could trot them out if need be. One is an exotic dancer, and actually—”
“Oh, please,” said Ezzie.
Zelda nodded.
“What’s happening,” I said, “is what he said would happen: we’re being thrown down into the dirt.”
“The public loves dirt,” Zelda said. “We’ve been National Enquirerized.”
Ada started to say something, then thought better of it and called Dukey Junior over so she could sniff his pants and see if he needed what she referred to, for some reason, as “an oil change.”
“Speaking of which,” Wales said, and he was about to let us in on the latest from the “tabloid shit-sheets,” as he called them, when Jesus came out of the inner room. He was brushing his hair back, and I noticed that he was now wearing a small diamond stud in his left ear lobe.
“How are my disciples on this day?” he asked in what I had come to think of as his happy voice. There were times when he seemed distracted—as if he were tending to business in some far-flung galaxy—and many times when he seemed disappointed in us, or impatient with us. But once or twice a day he’d appear to forget the weight of his responsibilities and just be a lot like an upbeat guy with a good career, a solid love life, a car he liked, a normal family, admiring friends, a low golf handicap, a thousand shares of Google from ten years ago, and a body that had not yet started to give him any trouble.
“We’re in turmoil,” Ezzie had the courage to tell him.
He stopped in midroom and set the brush down on one end of the glass-topped coffee table. “Let me guess,” he said happily, smiling around the room at his motley crew, “too many unanswered questions.”
American Savior Page 15
