Looking up from some simple accounting, the boy saw the Sangha car being refueled by one of the attendants. He leaped off the stool and pressed his face against a pane of glass that allowed those in the office to observe what was going on outside but not the other way around. Mr. Sangha was in the front seat with the chauffeur. The boy rushed out to the ground and loudly, officiously shouted out to Gordon, the attendant who had been sitting idly on an overturned oil drum. “Ey, Gordon. You don’t have nothing better to do or what?” He shouted so loudly that Andrew, the other attendant, was himself startled. The boy saw in his peripheral vision, as he made sure not to look directly at the occupants, that those in the car had heard and had turned to see what was happening.
“Get off that drum, man. You can’t see it have vehicle here. Get over there and clean the windshield, man. What you think you getting pay for? Check the tires. Check the oil.”
Gordon jumped up and headed to the car. He began to say, “Yes, boss. Sorry. I was just—”
“You was just what! I don’t want to hear what you was just. Get some life in you.”
The blood in his body was racing, his heart beating wildly with the excitement of being able to exercise his position in front of this particular customer whom he made sure not to look at directly.
He stayed in their view, walking around the station, proprietorially checking on the eaves of the office building and pretending to write in a little book pulled out of his pocket, until their car moved off and disappeared out of view.
To his horror, when he went back into the office, he realized that Mr. Persad had been watching him from the little window.
Mr. Persad very quietly said, “Why you were so hard on Gordon?”
“Well, he was just sitting idle, doing nothing.”
“Yes. But why you chose to talk to him like that in front of your mother’s former employer? You see what I am asking you?”
The boy’s face stung with embarrassment and shame. He said nothing.
“Imagine somebody treating you like that. How you would feel? Being a boss does not make you more worthwhile man than your workers, you hear? Without them, how you will carry on your business by yourself? We need each other, boy. Most times it is only luck and chance that separates us, one from the other, village and town people, rich and poor, the customer, the gas-station owner and the gas-station attendant, you know. How you can be so sure that one day you will not have to ask Gordon for something only he can give you? We don’t know the twists and turns of the world. I myself was once a factory worker. You must take it easy with people. Even dogs don’t respond to being shouted at. They only get frightened.” He told the boy to go for a walk and to think hard about why he spoke to Gordon that way.
After the station closed and he and Mr. Persad had gone back up to the house, although the boy was reluctant, he thought it best to apologize at once to Mr. Persad for his attitude toward Gordon, and in so doing to put it all behind them. Mr. Persad simply said, “It’s all right. As long as you learn something.” Without dwelling on it, he changed the subject. “You see today’s newspapers? I want to know what time is low tide. I thinking about taking a drive to the sea. You feel to eat roast corn?” The boy had gotten to know his stepfather well enough to realize that changing the subject was his way of forgiving and sparing him further shame.