Free American Savior by Roland Merullo Page A

Zelda calls it.
    Zelda reached across and punched me on the shoulder. It did not escape my notice that, until Jesus had come into the picture, she had not been the hitting type, and now twice in the last few days I’d gotten a whack.
    “What? It’s a reasonable question.”
    “It’s disrespectful.”
    I noticed, in the rearview, that Jesus was looking out the window as if he was studying the sorry spectacle of West Broadway—its chain doughnut shops and pawn shops and signs saying you could sell your gold and jewelry there, or cash your checks there; its boarded-up storefronts and litter and men wrapped in blankets sitting with their backs against a building in the sun.
    “Just Jesus is fine,” he said.
    “I thought it was Hay-Zeus.”
    “For Spanish speakers, it is.”
    I stole another glance, thinking he might be making some kind of joke, but it was hard to tell. His handsome face gave away nothing.
    “What about the Italian-American vote?” I asked, since my mother was of that blood. “Shouldn’t we say Gesu Christo when we’re in certain neighborhoods?”
    There was a patch of uncomfortable silence.
    “Is he always so much trouble?” Jesus asked Zelda, after a minute.
    By that point, she had turned away from me in disgust. But to her credit she said, “No, not always.” And then, “Only when he’s going to see his family.”
    “Some residue of stress there, I take it,” Jesus said. “I will help you with that if you want.”
    “Okay. Thanks. And sorry about the wiseass stuff. It’s a little hard for me that you don’t want to be called Lord or God or anything. I don’t think it’s going to help the campaign, either, to tell you the truth. I mean, if you perform miracles and call yourself Jesus, people are going to expect you to be a cut above the ordinary Bob Dole or Mike Dukakis.”
    “I am aware of that.”
    “All right. Just advising. If you want me to stick to security issues, I will.”
    By this point we had gotten our toll ticket and were climbing the ramp that led to the interstate. I knew from hundreds of other trips along this road that there would be a stretch of sorrow before we got out into the countryside: abandoned factories ringed West Zenith like the ruins of old fortifications, their brick walls alive with a garish graffiti of red and blue paint, gang tags, comic book faces, political slogans, or phrases expressing a kind of modern American angst. B RING MY JOB BACK HOME ! was a typical one. The rooftop water tanks were rusty; the windows had more broken panes than whole ones; the parking lots had become vast tar plains littered with shards of glass and old tires. Once, something good and solid had been made inside; now it was all broken bricks and scraps of crap. I wondered what he thought of it. The Big Man, I mean.
    “No,” Jesus said. “I don’t want you to stick to security. And, Zelda, I don’t want you to stick to press relations. You are two of my chief advisors. As a matter of fact, I decided to travel with you today in order to talk strategy. I value your opinions.”
    We were silent, both of us warmed by the remark. Jesus could do that,I was starting to see, could shed his all-business personality in an instant and make you feel like he’d known you all your life. I stole another glance in the mirror, and it seemed to me that his features had softened. The high cheekbones and slightly bent nose, the high forehead beneath the shock of black, swept-back hair, the large crooked mouth—they had taken on, by some otherworldly magic, a glint of mellowness. In full realization that I am driving onto thin ice with a forty-ton tank here, risking the perpetual ire of the appropriatists, as Wales calls them, I will suggest that Jesus was able to move from a traditionally masculine roughness to a traditionally feminine kindness, though, of course, those terms are outdated, offensive, and possibly useless. Still, that’s what I thought. He seemed like a man’s man