American Savior (19 page)

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 in 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 cities 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 Enquirer
ized.”

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.”

“Exactly,” I said. Wales shot me a look.

“My position on combating terrorism,” Jesus went on. “My position on climate change, taxes, providing birth control to minors, needle exchanges, the war, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the immigration question. My ideas about a running mate, most especially.”

“Not to mention your past,” I added, because I was in one of those moods where I could not keep my mouth closed.

“My past is an open book,” he said.

“Cool,” I said. “Problem is, most of the American public hasn’t read it yet. Us included.”

“What would you like to know?” he asked.

And Dukey, who also could not keep quiet, burst out, “If you’re a homo or not, number one.”

“Since it means so much to you,” Jesus looked at him in what might charitably be described as a tolerant way, “I am omnisexual and asexual.”

“Huh?”

“It means he don’t do it,” Ada said across the room to him.

“Huh? Why not?”

“Because he’s God,” she hissed. “Everybody ain’t an animal for it like you.”

Dukey smiled, then quickly forced the smile down with the muscles around his mouth. His masculinity, if not the Lord’s, having been safely established, he felt emboldened. “But what about this here Vermont guy? Is that where you’re from, or anything?”

“I was born in Texas,” Jesus told him.

“Just what we need,” Dukey said. “Another one.” But he was grinning broadly now. Judging, at least, by his state of origin, Jesus did not seem to be gay; all was right with the world.

“I was born to a Navajo mother in a clapboard shack on the plains of West Texas. My mostly Caucasian father died on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig while she was pregnant with me. She’s from a famous Indian family—my dad was an older man and basically stole her off the reservation in New Mexico, though her parents liked him. After his death she returned. She homeschooled me, except for two years when we lived in Kansas because she had fallen in love with a man from the reservation who’d moved there hoping to find work. That man was killed in a meat-packing factory accident, and we moved back to the reservation, where we led a quiet existence filled with prayer and tribal ritual.