If he was more circumspect with his own atheism, it was partly out of respect for Jesus and partly because he and his father worked so well together. His father was patient in teaching him to use tools, and Clem, no matter how tired he got, refused to be the first to quit when the two of them were moving earth or raking leaves or painting walls. He wanted his father’s approval, for his work ethic no less than for his politics, and he appreciated how frequently and warmly his father expressed it—he couldn’t have asked for a better dad in this regard. When he started tenth grade, and his father had the inspiration of reorienting his church’s youth fellowship toward a work camp in Arizona, Clem saw no reason to let metaphysics stand in the way of joining it.
Rick Ambrose had come aboard at the same time. During the first year, when he was a full-time seminarian and only a part-time fellowship adviser, Ambrose had worn his hair short, shaved his face, and deferred to the associate minister. But after the political tumult of the following summer—Clem had campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, working alongside his father, who in August had his lip split open while trying to inter vene between cops and protesters in Grant Park—Ambrose returned to the fellowship with long hair and a Fu Manchu. Some of the boys from the church, notably Tanner Evans, had adopted the same look. There was a new rowdiness on Sunday nights, a new impatience with authority, as long-haired kids from other churches, or from no church at all, started showing up at meetings, but it never occurred to Clem to worry about his father. Who cared if an ordained minister still carried a Bible and started every meeting with a metaphysical prayer? MLK had been devout, and no one had admired him any less for it. Clem didn’t know a man who worked more passionately for social justice than his father, and when you really loved someone, the whole person, you simply accepted the little things you might have wished were different. He could see eyes being rolled when his father waxed religious at a fellowship meeting, but Becky herself rolled her eyes like that. It didn’t mean she didn’t love him.
By the spring of 1969, the group was so large that two chartered buses were waiting in the church parking lot on the first afternoon of Easter vacation. Two separate work camps were planned for Arizona, and it would have made sense to divide the group by destination. Instead, as quickly became clear, there was a cool bus—identified as such when Ambrose dropped his luggage next to it; promptly mobbed by the Tanner Evans crowd—and an uncool bus, with Clem and his father and the squarer kids from First Reformed. For Clem, a bus was only a means of transport to the thin air of the mesa, the smells of pinyon pine and frybread, the chance to haul rocks and pound nails for a people his country had robbed and oppressed. The whole notion of coolness was puerile. Nobody in New Prospect was more socially desirable than his sister, and he knew for a fact, from the stories Becky had told him, that popular kids had no more substance than unpopular ones. Because he had Becky, he’d never gone out of his way to make friends at school, and the few good friends he did have were not in the fellowship, but he was on friendly enough terms with many of the square kids. Even the sour fat girl, even the compulsive punster, even the immature blurter had interesting things to say if you put them at ease and took the time to listen. This was what Jesus would have done, and Clem felt good about doing it.
His father, however, seemed restless and distracted on the square bus. Their driver was a little slower than the other driver, and his father sat directly behind him, ducking his head to peer down the road, as if he were anxious about falling behind. Clem went to sleep early. When he woke up in the night and saw that his father was still peering through the windshield, he put it down to excitement, anticipation. The real situation didn’t become clear until morning, when their bus caught up with the Ambrose bus, at a Texas Panhandle truck stop, and his father made Ambrose trade places with him.
Theoretically, there was nothing wrong with this. His father was the leader of the group, and it was arguably correct to share his ministerial presence with the other bus. But when Clem saw how eagerly his father bounded onto it, without a backward glance, something shifted inside him. He sensed, in his gut, that his father hadn’t switched buses because it was right. It was because he selfishly wanted to be on the other bus.
That evening, when they rolled into the town of Rough Rock, Arizona, Clem’s instinct was confirmed in the awfulest of ways. In the dark, in a dust cloud lit by headlights, there was a melee of baggage handling as the group sorted itself into the half that would stay in Rough Rock, with his father, and the half going on to the settlement at Kitsillie, up on the mesa, with Ambrose. Weeks earlier, when everyone signed up for one location or the other, Clem had chosen Kitsillie because its primitive conditions suited him, but most of the kids boarding the Kitsillie bus had chosen it because of Ambrose. Among them were Tanner Evans and Laura Dobrinsky, their musician friends, and the group’s cutest girls. The bus was fully loaded and ready to go, missing only Ambrose, when Clem’s father climbed aboard with his duffel bag.