But as he unknowingly turned the page on his twentieth year (for the
date of his birth was known to no one, and his childhood but a blur of
pain and abuse without names or numbers for reference), and as he found
his heart still beating, his lungs still demanding air, and the various
hungers of life giving him no chance to cease his restless moving, a
small miracle had occurred. Someone noticed, and more than that, fell
in love with him: a fifteen-year-old Chicano girl named Kathy.
Their meeting was chance enough, and would have passed like so many
others, but for the small compassion that still lived in him. Finding
her tearful and alone on the front steps of a tenement, in which her
alcoholic father had beaten and fondled her for perhaps the thirtieth
time, refraining from actual rape only because she screamed so loudly
and the walls were thin, William sat down beside her, gave her his
bandana to wipe the blood from her ear, and offered to take her to a
public health clinic that he knew. When she declined as the result of a
questionable immigration status (and a desire not to return to the even
more brutal life of Guatemala City), he had given her an ounce of
marijuana, along with spoken directions to the condemned building in
which he slept on the floor on a mattress of flattened cardboard boxes.
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