Saving Alice Read Online Free

already?” I repeated.
    Jim looked away, took another drag, and when he exhaled his cheek popped out, like my father’s when he was tired or fed up. “You just don’t quit, do you?”
    He looked at me again, and his eyes seemed bloodshot and vacant, and everything nice about him disappeared. I felt a cool shiver run down my back, and I wondered if he wouldn’t rather strangle me than speak.
    I was about to say his own words back to him, “Just forget it,” when he spoke again, his voice gruff and low: “You ever been to a fortune-teller at the carnival? You know … the Gypsy lady that looks at the lines on your hand and tells your future?”
    I thought for a moment. “Mom says it’s of the devil. No one can tell the future.”
    His eyes narrowed to slits. “I can.”
    I frowned and stubbornly shook my head. “No, you can’t.”
    He stubbed his cigarette in the charcoal-stained aluminum ashtray. “Hold out your hand, then, and I’ll prove it to you.”
    “No, thanks,” I said, pulling both hands to my lap.
    “Suit yourself. This here’s how it’s done…”
    I watched wide-eyed as he laid down his drink and cigarette and picked up a shiny knife in his right hand. He held up his left hand, splayed open toward me, showing crevices nearly as deep as the ones on his face. Turning his hand back toward his face, he pressed the knife into his palm, then paused, meeting my eyes.
    “Mister, what are you gonna—?”
    Slowly, he pulled the knife down, pretending to make a cut several inches long. He did a good job of faking it because his lips were pulled down into a painful grimace.
    It’s just magic, I told myself. Behind my left shoulder I could hear my father’s familiar setup and automatically braced myself for the inevitable father-son hug.
    “It ain’t the hand lines that predict your future,” Jim was saying, turning his open palm toward me to reveal a drooling line of red liquid. “It’s your blood line.”
    My mouth must have dropped open. The old codger was insane. At that point, my father leaned toward me, patting me on my back. “Take my boy here. I’ve already got him enrolled in a savings plan. By the time he gets to college…”
    My father was reaching full crescendo with a sales pitch I’d heard so many times I could have repeated it word for word. The savings plan, of course, was a bald-faced lie.
    Jim tossed the knife on the table, and it clattered against his glass. I waited for him to take a napkin or something to stop the bleeding, but instead he tightened his fist, causing small drops to leak out the bottom.
    I wanted to say, Are you okay? Do you need a Band-Aid? Are you crazy? But settled on something akin to pretending what I saw hadn’t actually happened. Besides, I was strangely captivated.
    “So … what’s a bloodline?” I croaked, my throat as dry as the smoke in the air.
    Jim sniffed, still clenching his left fist. He extinguished the spent cigarette in the tray with his right. “It’s your destiny, kid.” And then he added with a ghoulish glint in his eyes, nodding toward my dad, “Your bloodline is your ol’ man over there.”
    The way he said “your ol’ man” shivered through me. His eyes gazed on me again, and his last words came out with a thud. “I ain’t never seen something a Whitaker touched that didn’t turn to dust.” He gave a quick confirming nod of the head, lips drawn down deeply on the sides. “You never stood a chance, kid, and that’s why I pity you.”
    “And that’s enough, Jim.” Phil emerged from the shadows, and I realized he’d been listening to the entire conversation. I felt guilty somehow, party to a betrayal.
    Phil tossed the towel over his shoulder and leaned over the bar. “It ain’t right to take it out on his kid.”
    “Fair warning, is all I’m givin ’im,” Jim replied with another sniff.
    “What you’re doing is scaring ’im,” Phil said. “Go home and sleep it off.”
    After a quick nod, Jim tossed back