American Savior

  AMERICAN SAVIOR

  A NOVEL OF DIVINE POLITICS

  by Roland Merullo

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  FOR

  Marly Rusoff

  Michael Radulescu

  Chuck Adams

  and

  Ina Stern

  Contents

  One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen | Seventeen | Eighteen | Nineteen | Twenty | Twenty-one | Twenty-two | Twenty-three | Twenty-four | Twenty-five | Twenty-six | Twenty-seven | Twenty-eight | Twenty-nine | Thirty | Thirty-one | Thirty-two | Thirty-three | Thirty-four | Thirty-five | Thirty-six | Thirty-seven | Thirty-eight | Thirty-nine | Forty | Forty-one | Forty-two | Forty-three

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Roland Merullo

  AMERICAN SAVIOR

  I have dealt with great things that I do not understand.

  —BOOK OF JOB 42:3

  ONE

  When Jesus decided to run for president of the United States he began his campaign, sensibly enough, with a miracle. Two miracles, in fact. So I should probably start this story with a line like, In the beginning were the miracles, but the truth is, at the time, most media people—me included—did not believe in miracles, certainly not where a run for the White House was concerned. At first I was skeptical, and then, after I met the man who called himself Jesus, a little less skeptical. And then my whole way of looking at life was turned upside down.

  So let me start the story this way: In the beginning it was a perfect New England afternoon, May in western Massachusetts. The sky was clear, the air full of the smell of blossoming trees and drying mud, and my producer and boss, Paterson Wales, was standing at his office window looking down on the troubled city of West Zenith, which we reported on every night at six and ten. We made an odd team, Wales and I. He was jaded and sad from thirty years in the TV business, and I was up-and-coming, a smooth-talking, locally famous beat reporter with nice hair and aspirations for an anchor spot in a top-ten market. Wales summoned me to his office, kept his back turned, took out of his mouth the illegal Cuban cigar he would salivate on till it rotted but would never set a match to, and said tenderly, “Got something for ya.”

  I remember looking at his back and realizing that the suit he was wearing—luxurious blue wool—probably cost more than I made in a month. I said, “Shooting in Hunter Town?”

  “Nah.”

  “Cops with guns and bags of dope on a table at the station?”

  “Nope.”

  “Leak at the sewage plant on Westover Road?”

  “You’re gonna like this, it’s weird. Same as you.”

  “I’m not weird, I’m all-American.”

  “Right, I’m Mahatma Gandhi. Listen to me now.” And then, to my astonishment, Wales—who was not known for strong eye contact—turned around and drilled his baby blues into me, letting the hand with the cigar drop to his side. “Last night in Fultonville a little boy fell off a fire escape,” he said in his staccato fashion. “Three stories up…. Died.”

  “That’s sad,” I said. In those days—the days before Jesus is the way I think of them—I was jaded myself, having reported on a hundred drug busts and a dozen killings in the seven years I’d been at WZIZ. Gang shootouts. Domestic arguments gone sour. Schoolkids calling in bomb threats—things we’ve become used to and that had stopped hitting me in the gut the way they did in the early years. Kids falling off fire escapes was not on that list, however. Though I did not yet have children of my own, I wanted five or six of them someday, and I couldn’t sleep after doing reports in which a child had been hurt. Wales knew that about me, so I was surprised he was sending me out on the story.

  But then, after a silence, he added, “Died, then came back to life,” and watched me closely as he said it.

  “Good,” I said, “that happens. Especially with little ones. They can survive a fall like that. Wind gets knocked out of them pretty bad, they seem to be dead, but they can bounce back. It’s like people who drown in very cold—”

  “It was Fultonville,” Wales said, and he said it so forcefully it seemed for a second he was about to cry. Which was something that simply did not happen around ZIZ.

  “Right, Boss. You said that.”

  Fultonville was the poor section of West Zenith. Or, I should say, one of the poor sections. The second-worst and second-saddest of them as far as I was concerned, after a neighborhood called Hunter Town. Ten square blocks of cheap apartments, a bleak little park, rat-infested brick townhouses, the place was populated by an equal opportunity mix of whites, blacks, and Latinos, and displayed the usual characteristics of poverty: a lot of unemployed people, a lot of single moms, a lot of drugs, fights, sometimes shootings. Fultonville was the kind of place you didn’t go anywhere near unless you took a wrong turn off the highway, or lived there, or were intent on buying a class D substance.

  “Shut up for once, will you?” Wales said. “I’m giving you two minutes fifty tonight, top of the hour, so save it for that, okay?”

  “A large chunk,” I said.

  “Zip it.”

  He turned his back again, took a pretend puff from the Habana. “It happened different than that. If you believe the word on the street, the mother and her boyfriend were having a picnic out on the fire escape.… A little booze, maybe something else. The kid’s two or three years old. Falls asleep. Rolls over when they’re not looking. One of the bars is loose or something. He drops. It was grass and dirt he hit, but hard. The mother screams. She races down the fire escape, jumps off the last step, almost breaks both ankles. She finds the kid not breathing. A minute goes by, she’s hysterical. Two minutes. Eight minutes. Neighbors come running. Sirens in the air.”

  “I can picture it,” I said.

  He paused. Even with his back turned, I could tell I’d really ticked him off, so I closed my mouth.

  “Then, according to the reports, some weirdo comes walking through the gathering crowd. Street person or something. Guy no one’s ever seen. Maybe Hispanic, maybe not. Longish hair. Tattoo of a flower on his left forearm. This guy reaches down and touches the kid on his shoulder. Walks away. Disappears down the street. Kid goes from being dead to crying. A minute later when the ambulance and police get there the kid is fine as fine can be.”

  I couldn’t hold my silence. “Want my opinion?”

  “No.”

  “My opinion is this: the mother knows she’s facing a child endangerment rap, so once she realizes her baby is okay, she makes the rest of it up. A little positive TV time. The miracle baby. The good mother visited by an angel. She gets off.”

  Wales was shaking his head. “Witnesses back her up.”

  “Drug clients,” I suggested. “Neighbors afraid her boyfriend would beat the bejesus out of them if they didn’t corroborate her version of things. It’s something along those lines. To my nose, the story smells.”

  “Maybe. We’ll see. Go down to Fultonville and check it out. I’ll give you two fifty at six and a follow-up at ten if it’s any good. Woman’s name is Ada Montpelier, like the capital of Vermont. Try not to make me have to repeat it.”

  “The French university town. I’ll remember it that way.”

  “877 Ediston Street.”

  “877 were the last three digits of my ex-mother-in-law’s phone number.”

  “Who cares?”

  “The heart of darkness,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Her.”

  “Right. Go.”

  SO THAT WAS THE BEGINNING. The tattooed guy with the magic touch was Jesus Christ come back to earth. At least that’s what I now believe. I don’t necessarily expect everyone to agree, of course: a USA Today
survey, based on twelve hundred Americans, and taken shortly after the end of the story I will recount here, said that only about half of us think he was actually something other than an interesting human being. But let me tell the whole tale before you make your own judgment. I reported on some strange things in my days at ZIZ, and didn’t usually get them wrong. And the Jesus I’m going to describe here might turn out to be nothing like the Jesus the newspapers and TV showed during the campaign, and nothing like the Jesus you always had in your imagination.

  TWO

  Eight minutes after my interview with Wales, I got into my new convertible and drove to Fultonville—through what was once a pretty downtown, through a neighborhood of nice Victorians from West Zenith’s glory days, and then across the river and into the sorrowful world of American poverty.

  My theory about American poverty is that it is invisible. Or, at least, invisible to the people who have the power to change it. After the catastrophe of Katrina, for a brief while, we got a glimpse of the real American poor: the story was too large to ignore. But even those people—many of whom are still suffering, I would bet—soon slipped back into invisibility, and the great, comfortable mass of the rest of us, busy with our own troubles and plans, seem content to pretend they aren’t there.

  In any case, I found a parking spot on a busy street where the car was less likely to be broken into, checked to see that I hadn’t left anything valuable on the seats, got out, locked the doors, checked to make sure I’d locked the doors, and then found my way to 877 Ediston.

  A lot of things that are carried on indoors in other places are carried on outdoors in Fultonville, at least in the warmish weather, so it wasn’t a surprise to find Ada Montpelier sitting on her stoop surrounded by a knot of friends and neighbors, her ankles wrapped in ace bandages and her eyes puffy from crying. There was a newspaper reporter there from the West Zenith Sun. Randall Zillins was his name, a familiar name now, I know, but in those days he was a strictly provincial, low wattage type of guy. R.Z. we called him, and to some people those initials stood for “Really Zero.” R.Z. was one of those media types who is tormented by the attention other people get. I was in his office a few times and I noticed he’d tacked up on the wall stories he’d written—about the mayor, a local hockey star, a grandmother who’d gone back to school and become a chef. On every story R.Z. had highlighted his own byline in yellow.

  In any case, people looked up when I approached, and everybody recognized me. “It’s the Channel 23 guy,” someone said. “It’s what’s-his-name.”

  Ada was holding her hefty three-year-old in her lap as if he were an infant and they were still forty feet off the ground. The kid—who went by the name of Dukey Junior—was asleep and uninspiring, though after I introduced myself, I made a point of saying how strong and healthy he looked. Ada herself was not exactly the strong and healthy type. In fact, she was as thin as a stick, with electric hair and brown eyes surrounded by swollen flesh.

  She told me about the boy’s fall and the sudden appearance of the stranger, and then made the sign of the cross when she finished—which was fine by me. I’m more or less religious myself, though a tad mixed up about it since my mother is Catholic and my father Jewish. When I was a boy, they used to have these tremendous fights on the subject of religion, often after my mother made the sign of the cross, in fact, or said, “God bless you,” when one of us sneezed. My father, good Jew that he is, insisted the Messiah is still on his way and that God’s name shouldn’t be tossed around for something as casual as a sneeze. And my mom, good Catholic that she is, insisted there had only ever been one Messiah, his initials were J.C., end of story. I grew up plowing neutral turf as far as that question was concerned. But, if nothing else, my mixed heritage left me with the idea that God couldn’t possibly love my father and hate my mother, or vice versa; that God was bigger than our ideas about him, and greater than any name we might call him. (Jesus, by the way, agrees.)

  Anyway, I have to admit that, when I first heard it, Ada Montpelier’s story had the feeling of many stories I encountered in the course of my working week, as if it had been told so many times that all the juice had been squeezed out of it. You couldn’t hear the so-called ring of truth, if you catch my drift. Repetition does that. I don’t care how great a meal is, if you eat that same thing again and again for a month it loses its zip.

  But I digress. The point is that, to my well-trained ear, Ms. Montpelier’s story sounded stale. Stale, maybe a little embellished, self-conscious in the way the TV news has made us. I looked up and could see the broken bar on the fire escape, so that part of the tale seemed true, though I wouldn’t have put it past the boyfriend (nowhere to be seen) to have broken it ex post facto. Excuse me for being apolitically correct, but, for certain people in Fultonville, filing lawsuits for this or that disability or grievance was practically considered a profession. So this would be my report to Wales: Ada Montpelier’s story was stale, tainted by self-interest, maybe or maybe not true, but it was the kind of thing people loved to see in a newscast otherwise devoted to sports, weather, and the awfulness of the human animal. I was warmed by it myself, although a few seconds after Ada finished telling it, one of her associates hissed out, “He don’t believe you!” and pointed a wretched finger at me. She looked like she’d been on her way home from her daily run to the liquor store when she came upon the blessed ground.

  “Sure I do,” I said.

  “You made this thing with your mouth,” the woman hissed, twisting her mouth down on one side. “You don’t believe any of it! We’re all liars to you, all of us down here in F-ville. I seen you on TV, plenty of times. You always have a little wise look when you do a story about people like us. Right? Don’t he?”

  She made a half circle with her eyes but there were no takers in the group.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the hissing friend.

  “None of your business.”

  “Well, I believe the story. Maybe it’s you who doesn’t believe it.”

  “Eat me,” she said.

  “Fine.” I turned my attention to the mother of the saved child. “Ms. Montpelier, listen, we’d like to have you on the evening news, lead story. Would you mind if I called the camera truck down here? And would you mind holding Dukey Junior while you tell the story to us on camera, just like you told it to me now? I’m glad he’s all right, by the way.”

  Ada didn’t mind. She seemed dazed, preoccupied, maybe in shock—normal reactions, as far as I was concerned, after you’ve seen your kid, or anyone else’s kid for that matter, fall three stories. While we waited for the camera truck, she smoked one unfiltered cigarette after another, waving the smoke away from her little boy’s face as if she’d heard somewhere that it might not be good for him. More friends stopped by to touch the child and hug the mother and listen to the remarkable tale. On camera, she proved to be relaxed and genuine, and even provided an excellent description of the baby’s savior—tattoo of a flower on his left forearm, torn jeans, shaggy black hair. (Still eagerly standing by, Randy Zillins was jotting all this down with a smirk on his face.) The real story, of course, was that no one knew who the tattooed miracle worker was. As I noted in my concluding remarks, “The mystery man had never been seen around Fultonville before he came up and touched young Dukey Junior on the shoulder. And he has not been seen since. This is Russ Thomas, reporting live….”

  We aired the story at the top of the six o’clock show. Thirty seconds after the report concluded, the station started receiving calls from viewers who claimed to know the man, or claimed that similar things had happened to them but they’d been afraid to go public with their experience. The usual, in other words.

  Next morning, Randy Zillins called and asked if I thought the story was real. I told him, off the record, that it smelled. “Probably,” I said, “the kid fell, but probably not that far. Had the wind knocked out of him. This other guy, passing through, came up and looked at him, maybe even got down and checked him out, as
if he was going to do CPR or something. And then the kid came around, the guy took off, and the rumor started.”

  “I agree,” R.Z. said, as if I cared whether he agreed or not. “But that wasn’t the way you made it seem on the show last night.”

  “We usually hype things up a little, you know how it works, R.Z. TV news would be pretty flat otherwise. We don’t have the integrity of you newspaper guys.”

  “But why would all these people make it up? Mass psychology, right? That’s the real story. That’s what I’m working on.”

  “They didn’t make it up, they exaggerated. They were upset to begin with, the mother was ecstatic that her son was okay. It just swelled into something, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said.

  And that seemed to be the end of it.

  THREE

  But then—we were into the first part of June—Wales summoned me to his office for the second odd assignment. Standing at the window in another finely made suit he pronounced this memorable nugget of observation: “Since the miracle story we’ve been getting a lot of calls.”

  “BS, all of them,” I said. “We checked them out. I talked to my sources in the police, even Chief Bastatutta. False reports, as they say.”

  “Right. I agree. But now we have one from Wells River. Now, as in today. This morning. Seems like it could be, maybe, you know….”

  “Real thing?”

  “Could be. Who knows? What else are you doing?”

  “Not much. The football player in Homersville who’s putting together a ham supper at the church for his grandparents who just got back from the Peace Corps.”

  “Right. Go up there.”

  “Wells River?”

  He turned around again. “No, Mars. Of course Wells River. The hospital there, whatever the name of the place is now. Guy about the same description as the other guy, in Fultonville. Walked down a corridor of the hospital, looked in on this little girl who had … I don’t know, something bad … and a lot of people who used to be dying aren’t anymore. Including the girl.”