American Savior (18 page)

“That abortion kills!” someone yelled out.

Jesus ignored him. “The truth is that some people, good people, believe human life begins at conception, and anything that interferes with the growth of the fertilized egg to maturity is the equivalent of murder.”

“It
is
murder,” the same guy yelled. “It’s not the
equivalent
of murder. It
is!
It
is!
”

I saw Dukey moving through the crowd toward this loudmouth, pushing people aside roughly as he went.

“And other people, good people also, believe that life begins at birth. Or at some point between conception and birth. Or that certain circumstances make abortion the lesser of two difficulties. Or that it is a quintessentially private matter. I understand this. I see all this.… What I
see even more clearly is the hatred that has grown around this important issue. People have actually been killed in the name of not killing!”

“So what are you going to do about it?” the same guy yelled. Just as he got the last word out, Dukey reached him. There was a scuffle, a little knot of people blocking my view of what happened next, and I was wondering, not for the first time, if Dukey McIntyre would prove to be a net gain or a net loss for the campaign.

Jesus did not seem to notice. Or, if he did notice, he went on without reacting. “And so, with full respect for the complexity of this matter, as president, within the first two months of my first term, I will convene a national conference on the issue of abortion. Held here in Kansas, the heart of the nation, televised nationally. It will not be a debate. Hate speeches will not be allowed. It will be a conference, with speakers representing each position given equal time. This will not satisfy everyone, I realize that. I think of it as a first step only, a small but important first step. The reality is, if abortion is made illegal, people will continue to have abortions by the millions—there is ample proof of that from this and other societies. And the reality is, if abortion remains legal, people will continue to have abortions by the millions, and the hatred and anger surrounding this issue will not cease. So let us come together as a nation, with good people on either side of this question, and see if we cannot find one small foothold of national reconciliation, an intelligent and compassionate way of
reducing
the number of abortions, at least. Surely we can all agree on that.”

As soon as Jesus had delivered himself of this mild, sensible idea, people started throwing things. Someone about twenty feet from the stage was the first: he or she sent a tomato flying toward the podium. The tomato splattered against the floor and onto my mother’s shoes, looking like a splotch of blood. For a second or two I thought she had been hurt. Taking this as an example of proper behavior, someone farther back threw a stone. He had, thankfully, not been quarterback for the KU Jayhawks: the stone did not reach the stage but fell into the front of the crowd. More objects were thrown—hot dogs, corn dogs, cans of soda, sticks, stones, small briefcases; I even thought I saw a Bible go flying through
the air. Then there was a backlash against the throwers, and soon a dozen skirmishes had broken out in the crowd, and the police were wading in, and what we had there in the heartland, instead of peace and national reconciliation, was a melee. My mother and Zelda and Ezzie and the three Simmeltons huddled around Jesus as if he needed protection. And my father and Wales and Stab and I huddled around them, moving like some bottom-of-the-sea, twenty-two-legged organism toward the relative safety of the limousines.

“T
HAT WENT WELL
,” Wales remarked dryly, when we were all seated, straightening our clothes and hair, checking for injuries, and looking worriedly out the windows, where the police seemed to be gaining the upper hand.

“Actually, it did,” Jesus told him.

And in a way he was right. As we started our five-hundred-mile tour of the plains states, he repeated his call, at every stop, for a national conference on abortion. Listening to him, I wondered if he was crazy, or naive. But, if nothing else, it garnered lots of attention. Within two days some in the media had started calling us the Divinity Party, and though I think they meant it ironically, it caught on, and then, as the video clips were replayed on the Internet and the TV talk shows, it was the fruit-heads throwing briefcases and tomatoes who looked foolish.

The biggest news of all—and this reached us four days later in Kearney, Nebraska, a pretty college town where we had a rally that attracted some thirty thousand folks, and where the reception had been quite a bit warmer—was that two of the loudest voices from opposite sides of the abortion question, Milly Osterville of the National Confederation of Women, and Edie Vin of Americans for Life and Liberty, said they would be willing to take part in such a conference. That, as you might guess, was front-page news in every newspaper in America, top-of-the-hour story on every big news show, liberal and conservative. Zelda came running into the dining room of the hotel where we were having a late lunch and she was waving three newspapers and smiling exuberantly.

The two major-party candidates did not fail to notice this shift in tectonic plates, of course. Even after the wild rally in West Zenith, they had been more or less able to ignore Jesus and hope he’d go away. But with his mostly successful foray into the heartland, and all the publicity his abortion conference idea generated, they went into panic mode. And faith in our candidate’s divine savvy—if not in the goodness of humanity—was restored.

TWENTY-THREE

A few polls had been taken immediately after Jesus’s announcement in West Zenith, but no one put much faith in them. He was still a novelty item at that point, amusing news. For the real polls, we had to wait a couple of weeks. By then, we had completed our tour of Kansas and Nebraska, spending time mainly in small and medium sized towns there, and had flown to Denver and made another limo loop: Greeley, Aspen, Salida, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. One thing that surprised me was the variety of individual responses Jesus received, everything from the well-dressed couple in Aspen who walked up without saying a word and handed Wales a large check, to the diner waitress in Salida who refused to serve us. Some people looked Jesus up and down very carefully, as if they were purchasing an expensive golf bag; some people just wanted to touch him, or have him lay a hand on their child; some people seemed not to care very much about his divinity or lack of it, and they took the opportunity to engage him in a thoughtful give-and-take about the war, immigration, terrorism, taxes, or health care.

By and large, though, we had the feeling that he was seen as a welcome breeze in a campaign that, for months, had been full of bitterness and stale rhetoric. On route to New Mexico and another busy day of appearances and interviews, we stopped over in a rustic roadside motel in Trinidad—the Wagon Wheel Inn, it was called; I’ll never forget it—and were watching the news there when CNN flashed the prestigious Yansman-Carver poll up on the screen. It looked like this:

We were having what passed for one of our strategy meetings at the time—thirteen of us sitting around in a motel room with take-out food (decent Mexican, in this case). There were four or five seconds of stunned silence, and then, well … all hell broke loose. Everyone but Jesus was standing and yelling at top volume. It was, for me at least, the moment when our campaign went from being a David vs. Goliath enterprise, a quaint road trip with nice people for a good cause—to an actual run for the White House.

Only Jesus stayed seated. He was sitting there with a paper plate on his lap and a glass of cheap red wine in one hand. I turned to look at him, in midcelebration, and saw the sharp-cut, handsome face wrinkle from the smallest wash of pleasure and then fall back again into the expression of preternatural calm he seemed to wear at all times. Stab did what I wanted to do but was afraid to—he went over and clapped Jesus on both shoulders and hugged him. Wine sloshed onto the already ratty rug (next morning, as we were checking out, Jesus quietly instructed me to leave the motel owners money enough for a new one). Jesus laughed quietly at the spilled wine, looked up at my brother, and said, “Good news, isn’t it, my friend?”

“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
.