American Savior (28 page)

“They’re maniacs,” he repeated. “The guy never said he was God in the first place, did he?”

Stab came out to see us. I showed him a big, optimistic smile and told him, “Maybe this is what he was thinking of when he told you that, pal. He said they’d shoot him. Well, they did, and he survived.”

My brother gave me the walleyed stare for which he and his tribe are famous, and then he said, “He told me they’d shoot him two times, not one time.”

“Sure,” I said. “Right. There were two bullets weren’t there? I think we’re okay now.”

And I almost believed it myself.

T
HAT NIGHT, AFTER
Jesus had been moved upstairs and had spoken with his mother by telephone, and after everyone else had gone
back to the hotel, Enrica Dominque and I took up positions in the hallway outside his room. Police, plainclothes and uniformed, were posted at both ends of the hall and at the hospital entrances. Dukey and his cohorts were out on the back lawn in the rain, making sure no one got close enough to fire a rocket-propelled grenade through Jesus’s window. But I had the sense that the worst was behind us. The person responsible was in jail, his co-conspirator had been tracked down in the next county, and there just aren’t that many crazies out there. Even the pastor of the Temples of the Devoted Angels of Judea had issued a statement distancing the church from the event and the perpetrator. “While we do not accept this imposter as the One True Christ,” the statement graciously proclaimed, “we never encourage the use of violence to achieve spiritual ends.”

It was three or four o’clock in the morning, Enrica and I propping ourselves up with one cup of hospital coffee after the next, when I told her I thought we’d gotten safely through the roughest part of the ocean crossing and would be okay from there on in.

She looked at me as if I had started reciting the Koran in Russian. Deep down, Enrica was a kind woman, really. Of indeterminate sexuality and age, she had short black hair and a face like a small cement block set on the wider foundation of her body. She favored black pant-suits and giant hoop earrings, and pulled-pork sandwiches for lunch. The skin of her forearms was covered with tattoos of mythical figures wielding swords. As I might have mentioned, she was a practitioner of Thai kickboxing and had something like an eleventh-degree black belt. She had worked at the station about the same length of time I had, and we’d always gotten along. What I liked about her was her unflagging devotion to Walesy and her fondness for vulgar jokes. What I didn’t always like was her tremendous prejudice against anyone she thought had not grown up in as rough an environment as she had. This was the lens through which she saw the world: there were the very rich, and then the “spit-sucking yuppies,” then a small slice of working-class types that included most of her students at the Kickboxing Palace and the guy who fixed her eighteen-year-old Chevy Nova, and then there were the real human beings, like her, who had grown up in abject poverty. Only the real
human beings saw the world the way it actually was. Wales told me that, between her salary at the station and the proceeds from her kickboxing empire, most of which she thoughtfully invested, Enrica Dominique could have retired to Gstaad and lived in the lap of luxury for the rest of her days. But that was not the point. The point was that she had found a comfortable identity for herself, based equally on the deprivations of her youth and the mental inflexibility of her adulthood. That was her story and she was sticking with it, like the rest of us.

“For a guy who used to report the news,” she said, fixing me with her dark eyes and pausing for dramatic effect, “you are about as freaking out of touch as a professor.”

“Thanks.”

“You surprise me, Russ, when you say naive things like that. I mean, I thought you grew up in kind of a real family.”

“Real as it gets,” I told her. “My dad is a Vietnam vet, former boxing champ, and retired bricklayer. My mom made beds at the Scabies Motel for seven years.”

“And you think this is the end of it? That nobody else is going to try to hurt him now? What, it’s all dim sum and Bocelli from here on in?”

“Dim sum and Bocelli?”

“Yuppie crap. Nicey nice.”

“I didn’t say that. I just hope we’re done with the target practice for a while.”

She pursed her lips and appraised me. “Don’t you know,” she said at last, “that people get their ideas from what other people do? There’s about six original people in the world. The rest of everybody else are copycats. When it comes to religion and politics, ninety percent of people do what their parents did and think they made up their minds for themselves. They watch the news to see what the latest trends are.”

“Sure,” I said tiredly.

“And in a significant portion of humanity, the latest trend is let’s kill Jesus.”

I made sure I was standing more than a leg-length away and told her I hoped she was wrong.

THIRTY-TWO

While this was going on, Anna Songsparrow Endish was in the middle of her tour of the Deep South and making headlines of her own, though they were overwhelmed, for a time, by news of the assassination attempt. In her quiet way she was an inspiring public speaker. Unlike Jesus, she didn’t make jokes, do Elvis impersonations, or go for a swim in the Suwannee River. She didn’t flatter local tastes by riding bulls or surfboards. She went along quietly on her bus tour, stopping in small towns the other campaigns didn’t know existed and making stump speeches she had not written down and on which she continually improvised. “We are all one tribe,” she’d say, according to what Esmeralda told me, “and we need to begin to act as one tribe, to care for one another, and to contribute to the whole. My grandfather was a great leader, a great wise man in our tradition, and he often said that we should try as hard as we can to understand that we are, in fact, one body. He would tell us that each day we should spend time imagining ourselves as other people in the tribe, especially if we had difficulty with a particular person.”

To some ears these talks were the pinnacle of naïveté. The
New York
Times
ran a sarcastic article entitled “Navajo Platitudes Play Poorly to the Poor,” saying her speeches were like spoon-feeding chocolate to the starving. But, in fact, the poor, the otherwise invisible poor, seemed thrilled that she had come to speak with them, and were madly infatuated with her. Old men and women, many of whom claimed to have Indian blood, came out of the woodwork, in southern Mississippi especially, plying her
with gifts of hand-carved war sticks, moccasins, ceramic pots, and pieces of jewelry. She proved to have a flair for the symbolic, too. On the way to New Orleans she purchased a rake—a simple yard rake—in one of the better-off suburbs. When she arrived in the city she got off the bus with her rake, and her small staff, and her hundred or so press followers, and walked, without uttering a word, until she came to a vacant lot that was strewn with broken glass, metal scraps, reams of paper, and other detritus. And she began to rake. She raked without speaking, the press photographers crowding around her, taking pictures from various angles. She just kept raking, not answering any of the questions that were thrown at her, until, finally, someone else had the good sense to get a rake and join in. From what Norm Simmelton (who got hold of a trash barrel himself and went to work) told me, even members of the press bent down to grab a scrap of metal or an advertising insert and toss it in the pile.

When he regained his strength, Jesus called his mother and asked her to turn north. She was to make her way along the mighty Mississippi, staying as close to the river as she could manage, stopping where she thought she should stop and saying what she felt she should say. “I like the rake idea, Mother,” I heard him say. And then, “The main thing is to show people what a fine president you will make if anything should happen to me.”

THIRTY-THREE

The doctors at Swedish Hospital made Jesus spend a second night there, and then a third, to be on the safe side. Being sued was one thing; being the physician who let a not-safely-recovered Jesus go back to work too soon was of larger consequence.

When he did walk out of the hospital—to throngs of cheering supporters in the parking lot—Jesus instructed the limo driver to lose the press and then take him to the local hoosegow so he could have a word with the man who’d tried to assassinate him. I thought this was a bad idea and told him so.

“A bad idea morally, or a bad idea strategically?” he asked me. We had picked him up in one of the hired limos—just me and Dukey and Enrica; the rest of the gang had stayed at the hotel and were preparing a special meal complete with a show of get-well bouquets and cards that had been sent to him by the score (including attractive arrangements from Maplewith and Alowich).

“I’m beginning to see,” I said, facing him across the space between the limo’s backseats, “that there is no distinction.”

He smiled, but seemed distracted.

“You okay?”

“Physically, fine.”

“And nonphysically?”

He shrugged his big shoulders. “It might not make sense to you, but the goings-on here on earth sometimes fill me with sadness. Everything
here happens the way it is supposed to happen, I know that as well as anyone. Not so much as a single hair on your head stands outside the Law and the Great Plan. Not a breath. Not a sniffle. Nothing. But there are moments when the human state of consciousness surprises me—not in its ignorance, but in its
persistent
ignorance. Compared to the rest of creation, your attraction to violence, for example, is baffling. In certain moods I find myself wondering why that has never changed, never evolved.”

“Welcome to the real world,” Enrica told him.

Dukey was staring alertly out the window.

“There are moments when I lose patience,” Jesus said.

“Don’t do anything rash.”

He smiled. “Do you know that, if, as a race, you could forgo violence for even a few days, a huge karmic weight would be lifted from you?”

“Karmic?”

“The weight of sin. Transgression. The Law. Cause and effect. Use whatever term you’d like, but even a few days and you would see a noticeable drop in what you term ‘natural disasters.’ Floods. Earthquakes. Mudslides.”

“ ‘Acts of God,’ the insurance companies call those things,” I said.

He shook his head, sadly, it seemed to me, and waved once to signal that the conversation was finished.

I was left, as usual, with at least forty-five unasked questions.

The folks at the county jail were not overjoyed to see us. It was a bland concrete building with bars on the windows and a skimpy patch of lawn out front. We got out of the car, walked up the path, went through the front door, and stood at the reception desk until someone noticed. Jesus asked for the person in charge. When the person in charge, a plump sheriff named Henrik Wegen, arrived, Jesus said he wanted to see the man who’d tried to shoot him, Alton Smith III.

“For what purpose?” Sheriff Wegen inquired. He looked as if he were being literally, physically, pinched between the force of the bureaucracy behind him, and the force of the man standing in front of him. His eyes wobbled behind his spectacles. There was sweat on the folds of his neck.
He worked the wedding ring on his finger back and forth as if it were causing him acute pain.

“For the purpose of forgiveness,” Jesus said.

“Forgiveness,” the sheriff repeated, pushing the glasses back against the bridge of his nose. “Forgiveness? You know he’s still gonna do his time, don’t you, whether you forgive him or not.”

“I don’t care about that,” Jesus told him. “That’s your business, not mine. I’m here on my business.”

After a few minutes of this back and forth, we were allowed through a sliding barred door and down a hallway between cells, about half of them occupied. The occupants of those cells paid almost no attention to Jesus, and roused themselves only to hiss imaginative vulgarities at Enrica Dominique. Who hissed back. The place felt like an anteroom to hell, where every distraction and pleasure had been taken away from you, and you were left to face yourself. It would be, in many cases, like being forced to listen twenty-four hours a day to music you did not like.

We stopped in front of Alton Smith’s cell. “Person here to see you,” the guard said, and Smith raised his shaggy head from the book he was reading and swung his eyes in our direction. Jesus was standing to my left, a few inches separating our bodies. As the prisoner looked up, I felt a wash of heat against my left side, and I thought for one awful second that Jesus had been lying about forgiveness and was going to incinerate the man then and there. Shoot a bolt of fire between the bars and turn Alton Smith III—and the campaign—to ash. I swiveled my head. Jesus was standing absolutely still, fixing Smith in his calm, loving gaze. Nothing about him that I could see was different. But he was giving off heat. Alton Smith, however, must have seen something that I could not. His eyes went very wide. He dropped the book on the floor (red-edged pages, black leatherette cover, Holy Bible in gold), took a step toward us, and then prostrated himself on the cold concrete, facedown, arms forward, and began to weep in such a pitiful fashion that if I’d been the sheriff of King County I would have been tempted to commute his sentence to time served and let him walk. Not so, Dukey McIntyre. “Scum,” he whispered harshly from Jesus’s other side. Enrica was behind us. I could
hear her teeth grinding. Jesus ignored them. He stood there for what seemed a long time but was probably only fifteen seconds or so, said quietly, “I forgive you,” and then he turned away and we retraced our steps down the hall. Except this time, in the place of the “Hey, sweet one,” and crude kissing noises, all we could hear were the wails of Alton Smith III: “No! No! No! No!”

We rode back to the hotel in silence. Jesus never mentioned the incident again, except to ask us not to say a word about it to the press. At the modest welcome-back party he seemed relaxed, happy, and fully himself again.

THIRTY-FOUR