Free White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke Page B

this was the first we’d seen of the detective, the first visit we’d had from any authority whatsoever.
Double-
checking didn’t seem to be what he was up to, let alone
every little thing
, since he’d spent hardly five minutes in the house.
    Still, I was hoping he’d come back. When I opened the door to let him out, the early spring air smelled blatantly of sex: snails and garlic and muck.
     
     
     
     
    M Y FATHER CALLED THE DETECTIVE THAT EVENING WHEN HE got home from work, and when I asked what he’d wanted, my father said, “Detective
Shh-shh-shh
wants me to take a lie detector test.”
    “
You?
” I asked. The word shot out of me like a bat flying fast and blind into a picture window. I looked at my father’s pale plate of a face—the face of a man who took an absurd amount of pride in never having told a lie, his face like a bare lightbulb, all nakedness and surprise. My father couldn’t hide anything in the plainness of that.
    Once, my mother accused him of lying to her about the price of a strand of pearls he’d bought for her birthday—she didn’t believe they were as expensive as he said—and she’d held them up to the light of the kitchen window, looking hard.
    “How much did they cost, Brock?”
    “Seven hundred dollars,” he said, sounding defensive, maybe even a little desperate, as if he were being interrogated by the police about a crime he had committed years before, a crime he thought we’d all forgotten about by now.
    “You couldn’t have spent more than four hundred dollars on these,” she said, fingering each one critically. “You’re lying.” And she made this last statement with a kind of exuberant satisfaction, turning to fix him with her eyes.
    “I’ve
never
told a lie,” my father said, and he looked angry, backing out of the kitchen. I pictured him then with George Washington’s white wig on his head, an ax in his hand and that expression on his face.
     
    My father’s face was
so
unlike the face of Detective Scieziesciez, who looked sneaky in a calm, professional way, as if his sneakiness were sanctioned by the state. Detective Scieziesciez looked like a man who could pull the wool over your eyes for a long time—winking, calling you sweetheart, looking soulfully into your hungry eyes. He was a man of an entirely different order than my father—or, I thought, Phil.
    A
man
.
    Suddenly, I’d become aware of the line between men and
men
. Men with badges and hammers, and men who doodled all day on legal pads. Men who’d been to war, and men who’d studied accounting. And it was the former I found myself interested in. I found myself staring hard at jocks and cowboys on television—men with balls and helmets, or horses and whips, men who ate their dinners with their fists, always in a hurry, not two words for their women or their fans. After so many years of hearing and believing that men should be gentle, and sensitive, good listeners, wearers of slippers.
    Late one night I watched a television show about some archaeologists who found a Mammoth Man frozen in a block of ice. The archaeologists were afraid the ice would melt, and Mammoth Man would step out of it alive. On television, they were panicked, but in our living room in Garden Heights, I felt giddy with possibilities. Under that ice, you could see he was wearing only a loincloth, and he was carrying a club. I could imagine the smell of him as he melted—hairy seaweed, filth and microbes, the wet dog smell of snow turning into mud.
    “Teach Your Man How to Talk About His Feelings” the women’s magazines at the grocery store screamed at the check-out line, but why? I was tired of feelings being talked about. All this talk about feelings, it made children out of adults, adults out of children. Instead of men with their emotions, I started thinking about men with guns. Men in trenches. Hunters, and cops, and Vietnam vets. Men who kept their dangerous feelings to themselves.
    I thought maybe Detective