An obese Pumpkin came careening between Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother, tossing beer onto their sequined gowns.  He lost his balance completely and fell, upsetting a curbside plastic palm tree and its plastic pot, which tumbled onto him as he landed on the faux cobblestone.
        "Whoa! Who moved the sidewalk?" the Pumpkin asked through the spray of fronds on his face.
        The man watched this mishap from behind a traffic barricade across the street.  He held himself carefully within the shadows.  His eyes darted back and forth, automatically searching for lurking policemen.
        From his vantage point he could see Halloween revelers nudging their way along the crowded promenade of Mill Avenue.  Restored turn-of-the-century storefronts and electric streetlamps, mimicking the gas type in style when Tempe was a frontier cattletown, provided seven city blocks of backdrop for
the human mass of color and movement.  Strings of lights shaped like orange jack-o-lanterns and white Casper-the-Ghosts draped the branches of precisely planted white birch trees along the avenue.
        Workers in beer trucks dispensed foamy brew in plastic cups.  Pumpkin, having regained an upright position, began shuffling toward one, like a pilgrim toward Mecca.  Everywhere people carried shiny black and orange sacks imprinted with the name of the city’s annual event, the Haunted Halloween Harvest.
        Thousands of bodies encased in alter ego costumes swarmed along the street like bees on a honeycomb.  The outfit of an oversized velveteen rabbit a la Alice in Wonderland disguised a perpetual city council member.  Children sheathed themselves in foam rubber turtle shells and green tights to imitate television superheroes. A smiling Arizona State University student, dressed in red satin trunks and leotards with the Superman ‘S’ drawn on his T-shirt and a matching satin cape flapping behind, propelled his wheelchair swiftly along the edge of the crowd.
        The man wore smudged denim pants with their seams frayed and knees worn threadbare.  His plaid flannel shirt was equally tattered.  It bunched across his chest and stuck out of the sleeves of a polyester leisure jacket, also plaid but of clashing colors, which he wore on top of the shirt.  He covered his head with a stocking cap.  The night was brisk already and it was still five hours away from the coldest part -- the 3 a.m. chill.
        The man watched people holding out their Trick-or-Treat sacks to collect give-aways from obliging shopowners.  The masquerading celebrants laughed gaily as they reclaimed childhood memories of when begging was a party game.
        Amidst the crowd stood a pair of tall, large dark-haired men wearing white polo shirts bearing the words EVENT STAFF embroidered with red thread on the left side of the chest, navy blue slacks, nightsticks and two-way radios clipped to their belts.  Next to them stood a smiling young blond-haired
woman in the same attire, sans the nightstick and radio, taking ten-dollar bills from the partygoers as they entered the street festival.
        The man in the shadow turned away from the smells of food and clean bodies and the sound of other humans talking happily to one another.  He walked slowly to the back of the building then moved into the familiar alleyway, scanning the ground for coins or even a greenback.  When he reached the
parking lot of the hotel, which flanked Tempe’s main thoroughfare, he continued out of habit to search the ground as he walked.
        The dumpster enclosure at the corner of the lot displayed some large plastic bags perched on the open top of the steel cube that hadn’t been there when the man had walked the route earlier that afternoon.  The bags, he thought, might contain discarded food from the dinner trade.  He veered
over to take a look.  He slipped behind the refuse container to reduce his visibility, then climbed up.  Struggling with the knot of the first bag he tried to remember whether he’d eaten that day or not.
        Without the moorings of a workweek routine, days blurred into one another.  After a few mealless days he felt the same flat ache under his ribs whether he’d scrounged a half empty scoop of French fries outside the burger joint or had found nothing but greasy wrappers.  So far the man had always managed
to scrape together enough determination to keep trudging through each day, but the effort spent all his energy, leaving him without the resources to attempt a quantum leap out of his circumstances.  Merely surviving drained him.
        The knot came loose in the garbage bag and the man carefully uncurled the plastic to open its mouth.  Pungent smells of soiled sanitary napkins and used diapers escaped into his face.  He swiftly retied the bag and dropped back to the ground.  Apparently janitors had just cleaned the bathrooms.
        As the man neared the corner where the lot and the cordoned-off street met, a corpulent greasy-haired man garbed in an overstretched Event Staff uniform jabbed his index finger out and barked across the gap of twenty feet between them, "Hey, you in the suit."
        He snickered to his uniformed companion.  "Great costume."
        The man stopped walking and stood absolutely still while the security guards laughed.  They finished and he took a step forward.
        "Hey," the obese guard barked again.  "Don’t be loitering around this area now.  We know you don’t belong here."
        The man continued walking, pushing his shoulders up and back from his chest in reply.
        Pumpkin half stumbled, half jigged past the festival entrance into the sparsely peopled side street, bouncing off Cinderella and Fairy Godmother to his left and right as if they were guardrails to his out-of-control car.  He leaned forward to peer with an exaggerated squint into the darker path ahead
where he saw a fellow reveler making toward the bridge.
        "Howdy, good buddy," Pumpkin greeted, using a drunk’s unmodulated volume and a trucker’s cadence.
        The reveler’s arms flapped up and then down and the man turned on his heel to face Pumpkin with an expression that hovered between exasperation and weariness.
        "Whoa!" Pumpkin chuckled appreciatively, "take a look at that get-up!  Girls, take a look, will ya?"  He shook his head with further admiration.  "So authentic!"
        Pumpkin continued lumbering toward the man with the unmatched jacket and shirt.  The man did not move; he only watched the bulging bag that swung from Pumpkin’s wrist and the similar ones that Cinderella and Fairy Godmother held casually from the strings like handbags.
        He moved his eyes up to the women’s faces and saw realization begin to show in their eyes.  Pumpkin blabbered on obliviously, "Where’s your goodie bag, man?  Trick or treat!"
        He held his black and orange merchandise bag out toward the man, giggling with self-amusement.  The man made an overblown shrugging motion like a mime.
        Pumpkin dropped his mouth open and feigned shock to his sequined sidekicks.   "The man does not have his official souvenir fully endorsed and completely stocked Haunted Harvest Halloween party bag.  What are we going to do?"
        Pumpkin’s voice bounced off the concrete and the bricks and the plate glass windows of the darkened downtown buildings.  He bent in a formal bow, extending the arm on which the bag hung.  It slipped down onto his hand and he straightened up, stepped closer to the authentic hobo and nudged the air with the bag.
        "Hey, good buddy, you win the grand prize.  Here you go."
        The man cautiously reached out and unhooked the bag from Pumpkin’s fingers.   Pumpkin nodded at Fairy Godmother and then at Cinderella, satisfying himself that each had noted his largesse.  His swiveled on his feet, nearly pitching over, then began marching back toward the party or perhaps toward
the hotel to sleep it off.  The women followed, Cinderella glancing back and pausing to set her bag onto the sidewalk, leaving it behind in lieu of a glass slipper.  The man gathered it up with his free hand and walked guardedly toward the bridge and the pocket of unurbanized desert beyond.
        He waited till he reached his encampment to investigate the contents of the glossy paper sacks.  Cookies from the specialty baker.  Tiny packets of ground coffee from the cafe.  Garlic breadsticks from the pasta restaurant, and small organic apples and tangerines from the health food grocery, coupons for fast food, two-for-one meals at the diner, discounts at the trendy clothiers.  More food -- a packet of hot cider mix, beer nuts emblazoned with the local microbrewery logo, miniature gourmet cheese spread
and a quartet of cracker samples.  He ate the cookies and garlic breads first because they were fresh and would spoil quickly, and because he was very hungry.
        So was the cat that, three hours later, came sniffing about the mound of mangy blankets under which the man slept.  Its short orange fur striped with a dingy white was clumpy and dull and did not succeed in hiding its ribs.  Detecting a whiff of something possibly consumable the cat ventured closer
to the sleeping man.  He unconsciously repositioned himself, scrunching down deeper into the inadequate bedding.  The cat took quick backward steps and arched its back slightly, on guard.  The man, perhaps dreaming, groaned.  The cat retaliated with a hiss and a long high-pitched yowl.  The man grunted, shivered and covered his ears with his arms.
        The cat detoured to the other side of the man-mound and continued sniffing.   It located the army surplus knapsack in which the trick-or-treat booty was stored.  The cat began scratching at the canvas, nudging its nose under the flap.  In frustration it meowed plaintively.  The man grunted again, rolled
over part way and elbowed his way up to a sitting position.
        "Scat!" he half hissed at the cat.  "Get lost."
        The cat crouched but stood its ground.
        "Go home."  Belatedly the man realized the last command worked better for dogs.  He scanned the ground for a suitable pebble to throw.  The cat meowed its hunger-hollowed cry again.
        The man sighed.  "Scat cat! I gotta sleep."
        Meow.
        "I said, scat! Vamoose.  Go catch a mouse and leave me alone."
        Meow.
        "For crying out loud, it’s gotta be two in the blessed morning.  Go away!"
        Meow.
        "Hey, what do I look like here, the Gravy Train?"
        Meow.
        "Oh, brother."
        The man shifted on the ground, maneuvered onto his knees and leaned over to the knapsack.  He shook his head in surrender.
        "Okay.  You’ve been scrounging around here all week.  I guess you’re not gonna go away.  But don’t expect fried chicken and cream.  This is strictly dumpster dining, pal."
        He pulled out the cheese and crackers and a dented canteen of water, frosted a cracker with a thin layer of aromatic spread, and placed it just past arm’s length away on a flat ledge of rock.  The cat moved in immediately, sniffed once, licked the cheese off the cracker first, and then began crunching on the cracker.