American Savior (25 page)

“It’s Jesus,” Stab said, still teary.

“What? Because he isn’t sending you out to any of the talk shows? Look, he didn’t send me either. He has something bigger in mind for you, he told you that himself.”

But Stab was shaking his head in the exaggerated, solemn way he favored when he knew that the person he was talking to had gotten it all wrong.

“What then? Did he say something unkind to you?”

More headshaking.

“What then?’

“They’re going to kill him!”

“Nah.” I reached out and put my hand on his arm, but the words had made me suddenly go cold. “Hey, listen, that was last time. That wouldn’t happen again. I’m in charge of security, and before we go anyplace I always call up some big shot in the state police and tell him we’re coming, and they send out dozens of guys to protect him. You’ve seen the cops at our rallies. Where do you think they come from, huh? And plainclothes detectives are there, too.”

“He told me.”

“Who told you?’

“Jesus. God.”

“Told you what?”

“I told you.”

“Tell me again, pal.”

“They’re going to kill him!”

“Jesus told you that?”

He nodded. A tear dropped from his right eye onto the tabletop and made a small star there.

“Are you sure? When did this happen?”

“A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a … a while ago. In his room. He told me. He said bad people were going to kill him again, but that it was all right, he’d see me in heaven. I wasn’t suppose to be sad about it, Russ, and I wasn’t suppose to tell anybody, so I smiled and I hugged him and when I left I came right to see you and I started crying in the hall and I can’t stop, Russ.”

There was a polite knock on the door. A black-haired young woman in a pink uniform brought in the tray and set it on the table between us: a covered plate of onion rings, and two metal shakers with coffee milkshakes. She poured part of each milkshake into the tall glasses. She smiled at Stab and told him, in careful, Arabic-accented English, that she liked onion rings, too. He held one out to her. She politely refused. He grew sadder, kept pushing the onion ring toward her, and finally she had to accept, and she smiled at me as if she’d done something wrong, and did not look at the bill I pressed into her hand to see if it was a one or a five or a twenty.

My brother had a tremendous appetite and the belly to prove it. Like most people I know, his mood was always improved by eating. We munched and sipped for a while. I reminded him to wipe his upper lip with the napkin and he did so and then started crying again.

“You’re sure he said that, pal?”

“Sure, sure, sure.”

“He wasn’t making a joke or talking about the last time?”

“Sure, sure, sure.”

“And he didn’t want you to tell me?”

“Sure, sure, sure.”

I had chills running over the skin of my arms and back but, for Stab’s sake, pretended that what he’d told me was no big deal. “We’ll take care of it,” I said. “Dukey and I will make sure no bad guys get anywhere near him.”

“But Dukey’s gone away.”

“Only for a week.”

“But what if it happens before he gets back?”

“Then I’ll take care of it.”

“But when God says something is going to happen, doesn’t it have to happen?”

“Usually, but maybe there’s some wiggle room this time. How did he say they were going to kill him, do you remember?”

“He said ‘shoot.’ He said they were going to shoot him two times but that he would see me in heaven and I wasn’t suppose to be sad about it. But I am.”

“Did he say when or where?”

More headshaking. Droplets flying off left and right.

“Don’t worry, pal. I’m telling you. It’s gonna be okay.”

“Really, Russ?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Absolutely. Next time you see him, ask him not to let it happen. Tell him it would make you too sad, and that you’re his best pal, and that it isn’t right to make your best pal unhappy. Try that, okay? And don’t tell anybody else about this, all right?”

“Okay, Russ. Brother secret?”

“There you go,” I told him. “Brother secret.”

It was something we’d been saying to each other for twenty years. He’d break a piece of my mother’s china while stomp-dancing in the kitchen, or I’d sneak a girlfriend up to my room when our parents were out at a New Year’s party, and we’d make it into a brother secret, a mutual protection pact. It had always helped us feel we had a special bond. This time, though, to me at least, it felt almost like I was lying to him, making him believe we did not really live in a dimension of life where the worst of us could kill the best of us. For another hour or so, Stab and I hung out in the room watching Emeril make gumbo on the Food Network, as if the world was nothing but neatly sliced onions and simmering stews.

TWENTY-NINE

As much as I loved and admired my brother, I wasn’t convinced he’d gotten the story right. He tended to mishear or misunderstand things people said to him, and to jump off one emotional cliff or another several times a day. Did it heighten my already high state of anxiety about someone taking a pot shot at our candidate? Sure it did. But I was already doing everything I thought humanly possible, with enormous help from the boys and girls in blue. And it wasn’t like I really believed that Jesus knew he’d be killed and had chosen to reveal this information only to Stab Thomas and not do anything else about it.

In any case, no one shot at Jesus in San Diego. It would not have been difficult to shoot at him there, because he spent a good part of the visit standing on a surfboard near a crowded beach. The part-Indian, maybe part-Mexican kid from West Texas, it turned out, was as capable on a short board as he was on a bull. I don’t know why we should have been surprised at that. He cooked, he sewed, he sang in a voice that sounded like Johnny Cash, he removed splinters from Amelia Simmelton’s fingers with a pair of tweezers and a steady hand, he spoke knowledgeably with her parents about investment strategies. We had a renaissance man on our hands this time around.

Anyway, at noon on that day, Richard Sprockett hosted a Jesus for America rally up on the hill in La Jolla. Sprockett, for the three or four of you who have been living with an Amish family in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness for the past decade, was
People
magazine’s sexiest man alive
for three years running, a thirtyish movie idol who got paid forty million dollars to star in films that involved him getting into bed with one or another of the world’s most glamorous young women. For the first few years of his success, he’d done the usual stuff: jetting around from Saint-Tropez to Bora-Bora with one leggy beauty after another, diving off yachts into the Adriatic, getting arrested for possession of this or that, punching paparazzi, taking off his shirt for magazine covers. Lately, though, he’d had a conversion of sorts. He still made the films, still took off his shirt, still had the yacht and the nice-looking female companions, but he also spent millions of his own money to rebuild houses on the Mississippi coast, where he’d been raised, and to start youth centers so kids in the poorest sections of rural America would have something to do besides watching the cows burp on a Saturday night.

Andy Ray Pressbine, the aforementioned country singer, was a friend of Sprockett’s—a couple of southern boys who’d grown up on grits and NASCAR, and gone on to make it big. It was through Pressbine that Sprockett had gotten interested in Jesus’s campaign, and it was because the movie idol offered to host the rally that we’d ended up in San Diego (where the yacht was parked that season, I suppose).

The rally itself, while well attended, wasn’t anything special. A lot of young and middle-aged California girls who’d come to see Richard Sprockett in the flesh; a bunch of well-heeled couples who stood around not clapping and who seemed to have nothing better to do on that morning. Sprockett gave a personable and gracious introduction, saying, “Been waitin’ ma whole lahf for a president we can be this proud of,” then he yielded the microphone to Jesus, who thanked him and gave a speech that we on the campaign were becoming familiar with—about the America that could be, an America that cared for all its people and was revered in the world again as a beacon of fairness and decency. Near the conclusion of his remarks, Jesus mentioned that he always felt at home near the Pacific Ocean because in his youth he’d spent a couple of months “finding himself” as a surf bum a little way north of here in Santa Monica.

After his talks, he always had a brief Q&A (unlike the other candidates, who were whisked away in their limousines, kept safe from any
difficult questions), and during the La Jolla Q&A some light-haired, long-haired, skinny guy in cutoffs and an old T-shirt called out, “Hey, dude, surf’s up! Wanna head out?”

And Jesus called back, “Walkback, baby,” which was, apparently, some kind of surfing jargon. Fifteen minutes later we were riding down to Black’s Beach behind a Jeep with two colorful surfboards strapped on top and Jesus Christ sitting in the passenger seat. Richard Sprockett came along—a nice guy, I thought, though Zelda didn’t like the patch of hair he had grown beneath his lower lip. Naturally enough, a crowd gathered on the shore. I was happy to see a full compliment of photographers among the curious and the tanned. From somewhere, a bathing suit was offered up. Jesus went into the concrete bathhouse to change, and then he was paddling out to sea beside the surfer dude who’d asked him the question and whose nickname turned out to be Big Worm.

For the next hour, as the press corps swelled and the TV cameras rolled, and Richard Sprockett signed autographs and posed for pictures with teenagers in bikinis, Jesus rode the waves. He’d paddle out, wait for a suitable swell, get to his feet, and you’d see him outlined against the clear sky with his arms out for balance, dancing along the board, hanging his toes over the front edge, turning around and walking back, then making a quick cut to the right and diving over sideways into the water as the wave petered out. He had the physique of a yoga master, and when he surfaced and grabbed hold of his board again, you could see the pure joy on his features. Zelda could not stop looking at him, though she was surrounded by reporters badgering her about why this intriguing nugget of biographical information had not been included in the résumé she’d handed out.

“What do you think, Boss?” I asked Wales, when we found ourselves standing together.

He took my arm and led me off down the shore. A photographer separated himself from the crowd and walked parallel to us, snapping pictures. One of these shots would be published in the next issue of
Newsweek
(Jesus on the cover) above a caption reading, “Two of Jesus’s key advisors huddle on a California beach.” My father clipped it and carried it around
in his wallet, bringing it out at every diner and coffee shop to brag about me to his latest new acquaintance.

“I don’t think we can be beaten,” Wales said. He had to keep his mouth close to my ear because of the noise of the surf.

“In spite of the ‘more woman in me’ remark, and things of that nature? In spite of the NRA? The slurs? The unalloyed viciousness of our opponents?”

“Big word for you, ‘unalloyed.’”

“Thanks.”

“But you haven’t gotten any brighter since being in the company of genius.”

“You bragging?”

He actually smiled, then tilted his gray head in the direction of the country’s most famous surfer. “Everything he does, every step he takes, is calculated to hit them where they’re weak. The bull-riding shows his physical courage, his manliness. The ‘woman in me’ line shows his sensitivity. Hanging with Richard Sprockett shows his sex appeal. This surfing trick showcases his youth and vigor, in relation to the two fogies.”

“Who are about ten years younger than you, by the way.”

“Know who he reminds me of?”

“Who?”

“Muhammad Ali. He’s going to outsmart them, just like Ali did. He’s got all the skills, and he’s smarter than the other two, smarter than us, by a long shot.”

“Speak for yourself.” We strolled along for a while without saying anything else. The photographer went back to more interesting subjects. I said, “When the other two figure out they’re about to lose, they’ll swiftboat the crap out of us in the last few weeks, and our man is not exactly invulnerable.”

“Barring some major gaffe, I think we’re in,” Wales said, and for the first time I heard real excitement in his voice. “No more West Zenith for you and me, buddy. We’ll be working the White House beat. At long last we’ll be doing something that could make the world a better place, instead of reporting on what a crappy place it actually is.”

“Right. We’ll be able to wrangle memberships at Congressional Country Club, too, don’t forget about that. Listen. I wasn’t going to tell you this, but I have some disturbing news.”

“Shoot.”

“Bad choice of words. A while before we came out here, my brother knocked on my door in tears and said Jesus had told him he was going to be shot.”

“What!”

“Right. Shot and killed, but that he would see him in heaven and he wasn’t supposed to be sad.”

“He say where or when?”

“Negative.”

“Not good.”

“It’s not the kind of thing Stab would make up, though I have to tell you from experience there’s a fair chance he got the details wrong.”

“No more surfing photo-ops then,” Wales said. “We’ll have to keep tighter control.”

“He’ll never let us, you know that.”

Wales needed only two seconds to see the truth in this comment. “There’s a committee that votes on who gets Secret Service protection. As security chief, you must know that, right?”

“Sure,” I said, though actually I didn’t know it.

“Homeland Security boss, big shots from the Senate and House—that’s who is on the committee. Well, they got together last week and decided Jesus rated it. We got the call in Palm Springs.”

“You should have told me.”

“Know why I didn’t?”

“Why?”

“He refused.”

“Jesus?”

Wales nodded. “ ‘No Secret Service for me until I am officially elected president,’ he said, and he said it in a voice you don’t mess with.”