Shattered

a year old. A new car depreciates the most in its first year. If you want to get your money out of it, you keep it for three or four years.”
        “You could afford the loss,” Colin said, beginning to beat a quiet but insistent rhythm on his dungareed knees. “I heard you and Courtney talking. You'll be making a fortune in San Francisco.”
        Alex held one palm out to dry it in the hushed breath of the air-conditioning vent on the dashboard. “Thirty-five thousand dollars a year is not a fortune.”
        “I only get a three-dollar allowance,” the boy said.
        “True enough,” Alex said. “But I've got nineteen years of experience and training on you.”
        The tires hummed pleasantly on the pavement.
        A huge truck hurtled by on the other side of the road, going in toward the city. It was the first traffic, besides the van, that they had seen.
        “Thirty-one hundred miles,” Colin said. “That's just about one-eighth of the way around the world.”
        Alex had to think a minute. “That's right.”
        “If we kept driving and didn't stop in California, we'd need about forty days to circumnavigate the earth,” Colin said, holding his hands around an imaginary globe at which he was staring intently.
        Alex remembered when the boy had first learned the word “circumnavigate” and had been fascinated with the sound and concept of it. For weeks he did not walk around the room or the block-he “circumnavigated” everything. “Well, we'd probably need more than forty days,” Alex said. “I don't know what kind of driving time I can make on the Pacific Ocean.”
        Colin thought that was funny. “I meant we could do it if there was a bridge,” he said.
        Alex looked at the speedometer and saw that they were only making a moderate fifty miles an hour, twenty less than he had intended to maintain on this first leg of the journey. Colin was good company. Indeed, he was too good. If he kept distracting Alex, they'd need a month to get across the damn country.
        “Forty days,” Colin mused. “That's half as long as they needed when Jules Verne wrote about it.”
        Though he knew that Colin had been skipped ahead one grade in school and that his reading ability was still a couple of years in advance of that of his classmates, Alex was always surprised at the extent of the kid's knowledge. “You've read Around the World in Eighty Days , have you?”
        “Sure,” Colin said. “A long time ago.” He held his hands out in front of another vent and dried them as he had seen Doyle do.
        Though it was a small thing, that gesture made an impression on Doyle. He, too, had been a skinny, nervous kid whose palms were always damp. Like Colin, he had been shy with strangers, not much good at sports, an outcast among his contemporaries. In college he had begun a rigorous weightlifting program, determined to develop himself into another Charles Atlas. By the time his chest filled out and his biceps hardened, he grew bored with weight-lifting and quit bothering with it. At five-ten and a hundred-sixty pounds, he was no Charles Atlas. But he was slim and hard, and he was no longer the skinny kid, either. Still, he was awkward with people whom he had just met-and his palms were often damp with nervous perspiration. Deep inside, he had not forgotten what it was like to be constantly self-conscious and never self-confident enough. Watching Colin dry his slender hands, Alex understood why he had taken an immediate liking to the boy and why they had seemed comfortable with each other from the day they met eighteen months before. Nineteen years separated them. But little else.
        “He still back there?” Colin asked, breaking into Alex's thoughts.
        “Who? “
        “The van.”
        Alex checked the mirror. “He's there. He doesn't give up easily.”
        “Can I look?”
        “You keep your belt on.”
        “This is going to be a bad trip,” Colin said morosely.
        “It will be if you don't accept the rules at the start,” Alex agreed.
        Traffic' picked up on the other side of the expressway as the early-bird commuters began their day and as an occasional truck whistled by on the last lap of a long cargo haul. On the westbound lanes, their own car and the van were the only things in sight.
        The sun was behind the Thunderbird, where it could not bother them. Ahead, the sky was marred by only two white clouds.