The Eye

All that Bill Doyle knew about jinxes, which was plenty, he had learned from his grandfather. “Eyes fourteen!” the old man would shout at Doyle’s retreating back whenever he went out. The full Greek expression was, “You must have fourteen eyes for danger,” and Pappou, a refugee, knew that even fourteen eyes weren’t enough because if God wanted to, he’d give you a whack from your blind side, and the fifteenth or the eighteenth or the twenty-third would knock you senseless. The moral was, do what you can but don’t expect much. And so Doyle was sure that something would go wrong today, no matter how many precautions he took.