Shattered

guy's going to California, and now you. Everyone's going to California except me.” He sighed.
        Alex gave back the clipboard and tucked his credit card into his wallet. He glanced at Colin and saw that the boy was intently cleaning one fingernail with the other in order to have something to occupy his eyes if Chet should want to resume their one-sided conversation.
        “Here you go.” Chet handed Alex the receipt. “Way out to the coast?” He shifted his wad of tobacco from the left to the right side of his mouth.
        “That's right.”
        “Brothers?” Chet asked.
        “Excuse me?”
        “You two brothers?”
        “Oh, no,” Alex said. He knew there was no time or reason for a full explanation of his and Colin's relationship. “He's my son.”
        “Son?” Chet seemed not to have heard the word before.
        “Yes.” Even if he was not Colin's father, he was old enough to be.
        Chet looked at Doyle's coarse hair, at the way it spilled over his collar. He looked critically at Doyle's brightly patterned shirt with its large wooden buttons. Alex almost thanked the man for implying that he was not old enough to have a son Colin's age-and then he realized that the attendant's mood had changed. The man was not saying Doyle was too young to be father to an eleven-year-old, but that a father ought to set a better example. Doyle could look and dress strangely if he were Colin's brother, but if he were Colin's father, it was inappropriate-at least, it was to Chet's way of thinking.
        “Thought you was twenty, twenty-one,” Chet said, tonguing his tobacco.
        “Thirty,” Alex said, wondering why he bothered to answer.
        The attendant looked at the sleek black car. A subtle hardness came into his eyes. Clearly, he thought that while it was fine for Doyle to be driving a Thunderbird that belonged to his father ' it was a different thing if Doyle owned the car himself. If a man who looked like Doyle could have a fancy car and trips to California, while a workingman half again his age could not-there was no justice. “Well,” Alex said, “have a good day.”
        Chet stepped back onto the pump island without wishing them a good trip. He frowned at the car. When the power window hummed up in one smooth motion, he frowned more deeply, the lines in his red brow bunched together like rolls in corrugated sheet metal.
        “Such a nice man.” Alex put the car in gear and got out of there.
        When they were on the turnpike going west again, Colin suddenly laughed aloud.
        “What's so funny?” Alex asked. He was shivering inside, angry with Chet out of proportion to what the man had done. Indeed, the man had done nothing except reveal a rather quiet prejudice.
        “When he said you looked twenty-one, I thought he was going to call you Chief like he did me,” Colin said. “That would have been good.”
        “Oh, sure! That would have been just hysterical.”
        Colin shrugged. “You thought it was funny when he called me Chief.”
        As Doyle's anger and fear settled, he realized that his own reaction to the attendant's unvoiced hatred was only a milder version of that overreaction which Colin had shown to the man's friendly small talk. Had the boy seen through Chet's original folksy persona to the not-so-folksy core? Or had he just been his usual shy self? It really did not matter. Whatever the case, the fact remained that an injustice had been done both of them. “I apologize, Colin. I should never have approved of the condescending tone he used with you.”
        “He treated me like I was a child.”
        “It's a natural trap for adults to fall into,” Alex said. “But it isn't right. Are you going to accept my apology?”
        Colin was especially serious, sitting straight and stiff, for this was the first time an adult had asked his forgiveness. “I accept,” he said soberly. Then his gamin face broke into a wide smile. “But I still wish that he had called you Chief just like he did me.
        
        Thick pines and black-trunked elms crowded against the sides of the road now, swaying gently in the spring wind.
        The highway rose nearly a mile. At the crest it did not slope down again but continued across a flat table of land toward another gradual slope a mile away. The forest still loomed up, the tall sentinel pines in grand array, the sprawling elms like generals inspecting the