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“Fingerprints” by Justin Bigos (an excerpt)
Forthcoming in McSweeney’s no. 47

A story: A man, once a wealthy banker but now anonymous in rags, retired, richer than ever, wandered the streets of our city. He dug through trash, ate trash, slept on sidewalks, walked with a slight limp, as if he had years before suffered a minor stroke, or a terrible beating. Years before, in fact, his wife and children had died on a highway. After drinking away a decade of his life, the man quit alcohol, quit his job, quit his life. He became someone else. Do we still think it possible? To become someone else? We know this is just a story, so: He wandered the streets of our city and he smiled at anyone who met his eyes. And to those who then returned his smile with their own, he would speak: “Excuse me, ma’am,” or “Sir, just a moment,” and he would fake-limp with all his dignity—they could see this now, the ones who looked—and he would reach out a hand. Those who took it—very few, very few, God save us all—would find he had pressed into their palms a hundred-dollar bill. And was already walking away.

Another story: Sometime in your teens, in high school, around the time your father started showing up again, your house was robbed. In the night, the family asleep. No one awoke, no one was hurt. In the morning: “Mom, where’s the car?” The slow realization: missing VCR, missing jewelry, missing wallets and purses. Also missing: a baseball cap from your bedroom, a Cabbage Patch doll from your sister’s. “Are you sure, are you sure it’s gone?” said your mother, your sister crying. “Why would someone steal a doll?” Your stepfather silent, raging. The police found the car a few blocks away, in the projects, a man asleep, passed out, high as a kite, behind the wheel. It took weeks to get the smell out.
          Your father didn’t show up again until a few days after the robbery. Sitting at the table, shaking for alcohol: “It’s horrible, son. You should have an alarm system.” He comes, as if by magic, only when your mother and stepfather are not home. "Just pour me one drink, son.
          This man you cannot say you love, cannot say you don’t. He is the mystery man, the question mark. After a few weeks of his visits, always at night, the house empty, your sister asleep, he stopped showing up. The last visit you knocked him to the ground. He limped to the door, faking it a little, maybe, it was impossible to know, and he said something deliciously cruel. But you have never been able to remember what it was.

He said, Your eyes are like two sapphires in a window in Chinatown on the kind of day that makes a man want to get down on one knee. That was the first date, your mother tells you. Talked like that for a few months, then they got married. Her second marriage, his first. Marie had introduced her to him, the Italian guy who owned the deli across the street. He had noticed her walking by one day and asked Marie who she was. On the first date he wore about six gold chains around his neck, paid for everything with a fat wad of hundred-dollar bills. They did cocaine and drank beer, and he whipped out the line about the sapphires. Smooth customer, she says. Look at him.
          And you look, you remember: white T-shirt, two gold chains, pressed slacks, black loafers. He dresses like his brothers, his friends. Cooking calamari and clams casino on the deck, working at the deli all day, asking you why you want to date a nigger or kissing your mother behind the ear, he has looked the same since the day you met him, when you were four years old. Your mother wanted at least a father for you and your sister. She got a man, twenty-one years older, who worshipped her—even if he eventually lost the words for it. On the first date, she tells you, I had no idea he’d been living with another woman and her daughter for almost ten years. An entirely different family. I told him, Look, you make a decision. And he left me. Next morning, there he is, at the door with a suitcase, cigarette in his lips. She smiles. That fucker, you should have seen the look on his face.
          But she hadn’t yet told him she was separated from her husband—that he had tried to kill her and was still trying to find her and his children. Like the new man she knew she would marry, she had an unshakable sense of timing.

Your father at the table in jacket and tie. Have you ever seen him not in jacket and tie? Raised a Jehovah’s Witness, he learned early that one must represent God as His witness, and when you knock on someone’s door it can’t hurt to have pressed your slacks. He downs a glass of gin like milk.
          Last week you saw him on a corner begging for change. There was a cut above one eyebrow, like a boxer’s cut, swabbed with Vaseline. He smiled drunkenly at those who passed, his smile widening for those who laughed at him. You hid behind a bus stop, backpack slung over your shoulder. When the bus came you hopped on, and from the back you seemed to catch his eyes. Your father, the village idiot, the fallen preacher, his own cut man, a sad clown smiling in a dirty suit. But he was already looking away. 
          He drinks a rocks glass of vodka. He drinks a plastic cup of Scotch. He drinks a dixie cup of ouzo, a beer stein of sherry, a mug of warm chardonnay, he drinks handful after handful of water from the kitchen sink, combs his hair with his fingers. He has stopped shaking. You are just getting started.

The thief had come in through the kitchen window that led to the deck. The deck had been under construction but abandoned by the time we bought the house. The previous owner, a cop, lost his job and a couple years later lost the mortgage. At auction in 1983 my stepfather got the house for just over forty thousand dollars. It was on a dead-end street overlooking Bunnell’s Pond, five blocks from Beardsley Terrace, one of the city’s eight housing projects. The house was filled with empty tallboy beer cans and nudie magazines filled with black women. There were posters of naked black women—their skin greased, hair curled and wet, lips parted—on the walls of the bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen. The ceilings were painted brown, the carpet was dark chocolate shag. One wall was cocktail-olive green, another cat-tongue pink, another flaking, cheap gold wallpaper. On the first day we arrived, armed with garbage bags, disinfectant, sponges, and rubber gloves, we noticed again the deck jutting out from the back of the house. We walked up the steps, my stepfather, mother, sister, and I, and saw the deck half-built, the wood nailed down two years before now blond and raw in the sun. One of us peered in the kitchen window, a hand visored over our eyes. Inside, for whoever looked first: a florid signature of defeat.

Justin Bigos is the author of the poetry chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons. His poems have appeared in magazines including New England Review, Ploughshares, the Gettysburg Review, and the Collagist. He co-founded and co-edits the literary magazine Waxwing. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University. This is his first published story.