The Girl with Two Left Breasts

There Are Signs Everywhere

32 There Are Signs Everywhere 1. What is not detailed by the myriad sources of information about Kalil Franklin is easy enough to deduce, extrapolate, or imagine. The information is in part a matter of public record and includes data culled from testimonies, interviews, psychiatric evaluations, tabloid articles, internet bulletin boards and news groups, special reports, anecdotal urban legend, the official declarations of law enforcement spokespersons, and documentaries casting light on the tormented inner lives of psychosexual killers. On the other hand, the drab pedestrian garment of my sister’s life has been hung out to dry on the clothesline of public scrutiny and flaps pitifully as though in some breeze created by the sweep of rudely curious and assessing eyes. She is reduced rather than aggrandized by a swarm of mundane facts, and the significance of her life must be mined from biographical minutiae scattered throughout columns of newspaper print in articles devoted to someone else. 2. Kalil is standing in line at McDonald’s, thinking that his father did not even have the banal decency to be a man cut down in his prime by the scythe of gratuitous tragedy, or one who had fled the suffocating responsibilities of domestic life to perhaps discover his potential—an act of male dereliction D. V. Glenn 33 likely to be characterized by just such a forgiving or at least neutral catch phrase, except where the father in question is black, as presumably Kalil’s was, and the whole business in the end is made to support some sociologist’s shrewd puppetry with statistics regarding the disproportionately high number of African-American families deserted by black fathers. His father had at no time been a flesh and blood presence, his identity unknown to Kalil, a fact that left unanswered the most fundamental speculations regarding who, what, when, where, why. A man not even the simulacrum of a father, on whom Kalil could not even contrive to hang some threadbare and tattered garment of lurid biography: the debased life of a crack addict, perhaps, or the life of a high-ranking member in a street gang, slain in one of those pyrotechnical shoot-outs involving the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, or any number of convenient fictions with which to fill the vacuum of fatherlessness. Because vacuum it was, or had been, for a time, with all the attendant problems. For the longest time he had been the snot-nosed, butter-hued kid bullied by marauding boys on the block who had formed a loose coterie they called, with an oiland -water mixture of pride and self-denigration, Club Negro, a fraternity where the requirement for membership was a complexion at least as dark as the inky skins of blackberries. Even at the age of seven or eight, inundated by a sea of televised white faces that washed over his own darker world, Kalil understood that Club Negro was a defensive gesture, the stacking of psychological sandbags in an attempt to build a barrier against which the waves of a color-obsessed society could hurl themselves, dissipating into harmless foam. And he did not blame those boys, who took the blackness they had been told was tainted, the mark of savagery, and burnished it to a militant gleam, made it a symbol of legitimacy and inclusion. No, as they drove their knees into his stomach and scraped his face in ghetto dirt to darken it, he didn’t blame them, knowing what he and they would be up against. But he did 34 The Girl with Two Left Breasts long for the strong arms of a father to lift him from the folds of his pain, some man who would straighten him out and set him on his feet and teach him to become a shield before stones, a coat of armor against blows, a thesaurus deflecting their insults and returning them in refined form, a superior fictionist in the face of lies crudely fashioned and executed. Because there was no father to explain the peculiar ways of the world or to apply the bandage of wisdom to his wounds, Kalil was left to his own devices and that, he is now sure, has been the source of his inability to see clearly all the signs by which others so effortlessly seem to navigate their course through life. “You want to know about your father? I’ll tell you...