Meow.
        The man squinted at the cat, trying to figure out how it could mew and eat at the same time.
        Meow.
        The man looked around and spotted the source of the sound.  Another tabby, equally thin, but marked with black and gray fur striped with dusty white, was slinking its way toward the food.  Its eyes were the same intense golden yellow as the orange tabby’s eyes.
        "You little con artist," the man said, shaking his head in self-amusement and pointing an accusing finger at the orange cat.
        Meow.
        "Okay, okay, be patient.  This isn’t a fast food drive through window, ya know!"
        The man removed more crackers and spread more cheese and set it out for the second half of the furry pair.  He turned to search in his knapsack for a suitable water dish.  Locating an empty margarine-blend container, he turned back toward the cats.  Now there were three.  Between the orange tabby and the gray tabby hunched a Halloween visitor -- a pure black cat with big green eyes.  It had moved in on one of the crackers and was licking off the cheese with gusto.
        "Who invited your cousin?" the man asked the tabbies.
        Unperturbed by the inquiry all three cats continued enthusiastically consuming the unorthodox meal.  The man unscrewed the cap of the canteen, poured water into the yellow plastic bowl and placed it a few inches from the row of felines.  He watched them sniff the surface of the rock where the crackers had been, and vacuum the area with their lips to make certain every edible crumb had been ingested.
        In unison they looked up and forward, noticing the water bowl.  The orange tabby approached it first, sniffed, took a sample slurp and then drank in earnest.  The other tabby and the black cat waited their respective turns.  They behaved comfortably around each other, the man thought, as though they
had formed a casual pride to better their odds of survival.
        "You guys are pretty clever, huh, sticking together?"   The man’s mouth dipped into a frown.  "I tried that a coupla times when I first got here.  I thought it made sense, you know, one for all and all for one.  But the low-lifes I tried to hook up with just broke camp in the middle of the night and took all my stuff with ‘em."  The man gave a melancholy chuckle.  "I guess I shoulda known better, huh?"
        The cats finished drinking and began grooming themselves.  They licked their front paws and drew the moistened fur across their whiskered faces.  The man returned the bowl to his knapsack.
        He shivered, suddenly aware of the early morning chill.  With stiff movements he pulled the blankets up around his body and lowered himself back down to the hard cold ground.  As he tried to command his limbs to ignore the icy stabs that penetrated his nest the man reflected that even if the
cats took off before morning, they weren’t likely to steal his knapsack and his cardboard box which was tucked underneath the mesquite tree behind him.
        Two hours later, dawn glimmered in the sky.  Light gradually dissolved the black dome overhead, birds fluttered in the brush and warmed up their vocal chords.  Soon after a tangerine-colored sun vaulted over the horizon and the birds burst into full chorus.  The man forced open his eyelids; like reluctant roll-up shades, they resisted at first.  He blinked many times, groaned, rolled onto his back and drew his knees up toward his torso in order to stretch his muscles, which were sore, as always, from him having slept on solid packed dirt.
        A few feet away the cats were performing their wake-up stretches also, arching their backs into horseshoe shapes and shuttering.  Each of them in turn yawned heartily.  Their long pink tongues uncurled and rippled between their canine teeth.
        The man shook out each of his worn blankets and folded them separately.  He carried them to the cardboard box and ceremoniously piled them on top of the sum total of his possessions inside.  He folded the end flaps over the stash and scooted the box farther beneath the thorny branches.  Glancing around to make sure no other members of his society had observed his clandestine arrangements, he walked back to the feline trio who were watching him with curious eyes.
        "Well, fellas, I gotta warn ya that you didn’t exactly choose a star provider here."  The man put his hands on his hips and looked at each of the cats eye to eye.  Without being asked, his memories rewound themselves and played back selected scenes of the lay-off, of the step by step loss of faith in him by his wife and young daughters, of the ruthlessly repeated turn-downs when he applied for jobs.
        "Just ask my wife, I mean my former wife, she’ll tell ya, boys."  The cats padded over to the cardboard box and began moving their noses over its surface like Geiger counters.
        The man shook his head.  "Sorry, kids, no food in there."  He pulled his fingers through his hair trying to approximate the effects of a hairbrush.
        "If you guard camp, I’ll go get us some breakfast," the man told the cats as he situated the knapsack on his shoulders.  What he didn’t tell them was that he wasn’t really sure he could provide breakfast for them, or himself.  They were innocent, dependent creatures, like children, and it was his duty to not tell them the whole truth sometimes, otherwise they would feel frightened.
        Since arriving in Arizona via a Greyhound bus on a futile quest to find a job, the man had discovered that telling adults the truth usually didn’t work, either.  Although he faithfully told each prospective benefactor the real reason he was asking for their spare change, their faces told him they
believed he’d spend it on alcohol or cocaine and not on the sandwich bread and peanut butter he claimed to need.  Soon he had adopted a personal policy not to beg for what he needed but to try to get by with what he had and to earn anything he obtained.
        The man squatted down and held out his hand toward the cats.  The black one padded to him, expecting to find food in his hand.  Instead the man offered the ebony-furred animal strokes along its back and gentle scratches along the sides of its face.  It purred its appreciation.
        "Nothing person, buddy, but I hope you’re not a bad luck black cat."
        The cat continued to purr.
        "I didn’t use to believe in bad luck, ya know, but then it kept happening to me and now, well..."
        The cat began circling the man, rubbing itself against his ankles and his hands.
        The man sighed.  "Well, I guess it’s one of those things you have to experience to really understand and a lot of people’ve never really had bad luck."
        The man straightened up and addressed the felines as a group.  "Okay, fellas, try not to invite any more relatives.  Four empty stomachs is enough."
        The man walked away from his camp and began shuffling along the long stretch of concrete sidewalk toward the bridge and downtown.  His shoes, an ancient pair of women’s walking shoes with mismatched laces and layers of dried mud on top of layers of scuffs, tread on the uneven sections of coarse concrete impressed with lettering that read "WPA 1930."
        When he reached the bridge he stopped next to the first of four art-deco style alcoves stationed along the structure.  The upheaval that had come to this area of the riverbed still unsettled the man. Cement benches in the alcoves offered strolling couples a private retreat for conversation and, more often, cave-like quarters for the night to a transient.  The man delighted his eyes with the sparkle of sunshine dancing on the harlequin checkered waves of the Town Lake that lapped against the pilings of the bridge beneath him.  Not until last summer, when developers poured slabs of concrete to form artificial banks for the river and spillways across its bed to form an equally artificial lake, had the Salt River contained water.
        Before then only infrequent, random rain storms would flood its network of dry desert washes, sending short-lived but deadly torrents of water sluicing into the wide flat riverbed.  Such capricious fate was now controlled by human engineering according to the dedication plaque mounted on the railing
near where the man stood.
        He moved along after a few seconds because the stench of urine and rotting garbage from the alcove harassed his sensibilities.  He stopped midway to the next alcove and stood longer to watch the sun ascend the cloudless sky and arch over the abandoned grain silos of the Hayden Flour Mill.  The
whitewashed cylinders that proudly stretched ten stories into the air had been constructed in the early 1900’s before the Great Depression by Carl Hayden, one of the founding fathers of the scrappy pioneer town.  Mill Avenue was named after the building.  Yet, developers of the Town Lake planned to demolish the historic plant to make room for a resort hotel.  Soon tourists would be curling cozily under thick comforters in their king-size hotel beds and watching free cable TV in the very spot at which the man had camped months earlier.
        Since the man had never shopped in the downtown IGA grocery story before, he had to read the aisle markers to find the shelf with cat food.  Fifty-nine cents each for a small can of Friskies.  Four-ninety-nine for a five pound bag of Purina Cat Chow.  The man thrust his hands in his empty
pockets.
        He looked up and down the aisle at the wall of aggressively colorful packages -- an intimidating embankment of boxes, bags, cans and bottles stacked half-a-dozen deep, each with secretly coded UPCs demanding money he didn’t have.  He stared at the appealing drawings of cats on the packages of
feline grub.  One sported a Calico prancing eagerly toward the viewer.  Presumably she was anticipating a yummy dinner of the product contained inside the box.  Another package depicted a gray tabby cat sitting regally and flashing its seductive yellow eyes at potential consumers.
        "I know that trick," the man said, thinking of the similar-looking animal that had worked its magic on him the night before.
        "Yeah, I know that trick," he repeated to himself, thinking also of the message written in the margin of his high school yearbook more than a decade and a half ago.  Next to the man’s thumb-sized portrait, which stood out among the checkerboard of faces on the page because of his intensely passionate dark eyes, his football coach had scribbled, ‘Keep the Eye of the Tiger burning, man.’  A junkie for masculine drama, his coach had hooked onto the hit movie of the year, "Rocky III," and used its dialogue like mantras to motivate his Division C team throughout the season.  They reached divisional play-offs
for the state championship, which surprised urban schools in their division who had underestimated the drive of a scraggly pack of boys from a declining farming town in the sticks.  Although the team lost the championship, the man won the interest of one of the cheerleaders.  They married two months after graduation, planning to live the typical, unremarkable life of a middle-class, Middle American couple.
        Standing now in front of 25-pound pet food bags, stacked like a sandbag dam, the man said, again, "Yeah, I do know that trick."  He turned and walked with purpose to the end of the aisle.
        The man searched the store until he found an employee, a college-aged man in the produce section who was stacking apples into a pyramid-shaped display.  On the left breast of his work uniform polo shirt was pinned a name tag that read "Joe."
        "Hi.  Uh, I wanted to buy some cat food but I don’t have any money right now," the man began.  Joe frowned, taking a visual inventory of the man’s appearance.
        "So," the man continued, "I was wondering if there’s any job I can do to earn the money?  Just five or ten dollars."
        Joe smoothed his frown into a more sympathetic expression, but at the same time shook his head, making his blond hair shimmy.  "I don’t really know.  I mean I kind of doubt it.  They just cut my hours last week."
        He shrugged and motioned the man to follow him.  Joe guided him through double swinging doors covered with a stainless steel shell into a warehouse area.  Plastic wrapped pallets stood along the walls.
        A short bald man with a round belly, dressed in blue polyester work slacks and a white cotton/polyester mix work shirt with its sleeves rolled up to the elbows, stood a few feet away.  He spoke energetically into the handset of a wall-mounted phone.  On the pocket of his shirt he had pinned a name
tag which read "Al Smith, General Manager."  Al hung up the phone.
        "Mr. Smith, sir," Joe said, "this, uh, gentleman is looking for work."
        "OK, Joe."  Al dismissed Joe with a nod.  Then he called after him as Joe walked back toward the swinging doors, "Wax those new cucumbers as soon as you’re done with the apples."  Joe acknowledged the instruction with a nod and pushed through the doors.
        "We’re not hiring right now," Al said, not looking at the man but instead unhooking a clipboard that hung next to the phone and studying the paper pinned on it.
        "Well, I’m not actually looking for a job..."
        "That’s good, because we’re not hiring."
        "Um, I want to buy some cat food, Mr. Smith, and I don’t have any money..."
        Al turned back toward the man.  "No soliciting!  There’s a sign right at the front of the store."  Al pointed to the delivery truck entrance of the warehouse where a cement ramp butted up against a wide opening with a curtain of plastic strips hanging over head.  "Get going before I call the cops."
        "I’m not meaning to cause trouble, Mr. Smith.  And I’m not asking for a handout.  I’m just trying to explain that my cats need food so I’m looking to find some way to earn a few dollars so I can buy a bag.  I thought maybe there’d be something around here I could do just for today.  Some odd job
you could use help with?"
        Al looked at the ceiling and blew air out of his cheeks.  "You people always use the same stupid gimmicks.  Yeah, right, you want money to feed your precious little kitty.  Try, you wanna feed your sorry gut the cheapest wine you can find."  Al shook his head like a parent listening to his tardy
teenager’s excuse of a flat tire.
        The man glanced around the warehouse, noticing stacks of boxes that had been pulled off the pallets they’d arrived on and were awaiting unpacking, pricing and stocking.  He saw a produce display table with a damaged apron that needed repair and repainting.
        Al hung the clipboard back on its hook and crossed his arms.  "Okay, pal, let’s see what kinda story you can pull out your ass -- tell me all about your mythical cat."
        "There’s three of ‘em, actually," the man began, making it a point to look Al in the eye while keeping his facial expression neutral.  "They came begging at my camp last night and all I had to feed them was cheese and crackers."
        Al looked at the man straight in the eyes, also.  The tight smirk that gripped his mouth slackened minutely.
        The man continued, "There’s an orange one that looks like a tiger.  And a gray one.  He has stripes, too.  And then there’s a pure black one."
        One of Al’s eyebrows hitched up at the mention of the black cat.
       "I thought it was kinda coincidental, or somethin’, that this black cat shows up on Halloween," the man said.  He shrugged.  "But then you can read too much into stuff.  He’s probably just another stray.  All I know is that they’re all hungry."
        The man nodded toward the broken table.  Al looked at it, too.  "I’m good with my hands," the man said.  "Is there anything at all I could do for ya?"
        Al turned his attention back to the man’s face.  For several seconds he held the man’s eyes.  He pursed his lips and let his eyes slip away from contact with the man as he filled his cheeks with air and blew it out.
        "You see," Al said, "the problem is insurance, okay?  See, everybody’s so sue-happy these days I can’t even pay my people decent because I have to cover insurance costs and those clowns just keep jackin’ up the prices every time you turn around, you know?" Al looked at the man whose pants and
shirt did not match and whose face wore the same weariness his did.
        "So see, I can’t be going and hiring guys for a couple of hours to do something on the premises, even contract labor like that, because first thing you know somebody gets hurt and the insurance people hike up the premiums even when a claim hasn’t been submitted."
        The man nodded.  "Sure, Mr. Smith, I understand.  That’s one of the reasons they told us we didn’t have jobs anymore, just out of the blue one morning when we showed up to punch in."
        Al steered his eyes back to the man’s face and blinked rapidly several times.  His eyes retreated back to the blank space beside the man.  Clearing his throat, Al said, "Well, so anyway, I, uh, I don’t hire anyone, even for a few hours, to do odds jobs.  It’s too risky."
        "Sure, Mr. Smith.  I understand."
        The next day the man walked across the bridge into downtown again.  This time he headed for the health food grocery store, Gentle Strength Cooperative, and its companion "Free Store."  A hand lettered sign in the Free Store window said CLOSED; another smaller sign below it, also hand lettered, listed the store hours.  They varied every day according to when volunteers could work.
        If today was Thursday, the fact of which the man was not completely certain, the store would open at 10:30 am.  He couldn’t see any clock inside the store so he looked at the shadows cast by the eucalyptus trees lining the parking lot.  A few cars filled spots in the small lot and the man had noticed a woman clad in a madras dress entering the grocery just as its doors opened for business at 9:30.  That confirmed what the shadows told him -- he’d have about an hour’s wait.
        He sat down on the cement landing and let his legs dangle down over the edge.  Reviewing the mental list of items he needed, he knew by store rules that he’d have only fifteen minutes to locate and claim his selections.  Of course, there was no guarantee what he needed would be there since the
"merchandise" was all donated.  He could get some of it from one of those men’s overnight shelters, but he couldn’t exchange volunteer work for the goods as he could and would at the Free Store.
        An hour later the volunteer worker drove his rusty Celica into the lot and parked it next to the wide space marked with the wheelchair symbol.   He hopped out of the aging vehicle and waved at the man.  The long-haired fellow, who appeared to belong to the next generation younger than the man, wore the same faded jeans, tie-dyed T-shirt and sandals the man had seen him wearing the last time.  The man also was clad in the same clothes he’d worn at their previous encounter months earlier.
        "Hey, man, I haven’t seen you in a long time," the volunteer said as he unlocked the front door of the Free Store.
        "Yeah," said the man.  "I don’t shop here very often.  I mostly just try to get by with what I have."
        Neither man knew the other’s name so they simply smiled at each other and entered the store.  The man glanced around while the volunteer flipped on the lights and dragged forward knee-high cardboard boxes out from a cluttered area in the back and into the store proper.  One box contained bed linens, the other bath linens -- clean, one-of-a-kind, unmatched and used, but still usable.  This store’s shelves, which rose only to the height of the man’s waist and were constructed of scrap plywood and bricks, offered no brightly packaged food stuffs in profuse quantities.  Instead they displayed previously owned shoes of all types, mateless dishes with small chips and scrape marks, tarnished toasters and faintly grubby alarm clocks, second-hand desk lamps, paperbacks with cracked spines and curled pages.  On
store fixtures orphaned by the college town’s trendy boutiques hung used clothes -- shirts, dresses, pants and slacks, a few sweaters and coats, and even fewer children’s outfits.
        The man sifted through shoe boxes of personal care items to find just one brush that looked as if it might work for his purpose.  He chose a comb with wider than normal gaps between the teeth, too.  After hesitating he also picked out a shaving mirror that could hang or stand and that had a regular mirror on one side and a 3x magnification mirror on the opposite side.  It was too elaborate for his needs but since it was the only mirror in the store today, the man took it reluctantly.  A travel size canister of shaving
cream completed his shopping spree.  Holding the goods in his outstretched hand for inspection, the man approached the volunteer at the counter.
        "That’s it?" said the volunteer.
        "That’s it," the man said.  Then he noticed a large wicker picnic basket resting at an extreme angle atop a mound of bulging plastic bags in the storage area.
        "Oh, wait," the man quickly added, "may I have that basket, too?"
        The volunteer swiveled his head about, unsure of which basket the man intended.  The man guided the volunteer’s gaze by moving the focus of his own eyes again from the cluster of items in his hands to the basket perched on sacks of unsorted donations.
        "Oh! the Toto basket? Sure!" the volunteer replied.  He plucked the woven carrier from its awkward perch and held it out to the man.
        The man lifted one side of the lid and put his mirror and other finds inside.  "Toto basket?" he asked.
        The volunteer chuckled.  "You know, Toto -- the cute little dog from ‘The Wizard of Oz."
        The man’s expression of confusion faded into a brief smile.  "Oh, yeah.  I remember. That ‘wicked witch’ lady takes Toto away from Dorothy.  She puts him in a basket like this and is pedaling away like crazy on her bicycle. All around them the wind is whipping up into a tornado."
        "Right!"  The volunteer held his arms out and positioned his hands as if he were gripping handlebars.  He began to hum the sinister-sounding background score from the movie scene.  Both men laughed.
        The man said, "I hope to fit three animals in this basket -- if they’ll cooperate."
        "Dogs?" the volunteer asked with raised eyebrows.
        "Nope. Cats." The man shrugged.
        "Good luck, man," the volunteer said.  His expression held a residue of skepticism.
        "When should I come in to work for this and what do you need done?"
        The volunteer flipped through some pages in a three-hole binder.  "Actually the counter is already covered for the next two weeks and the back room looks good, too.  Hmmm.  Hey, you any good at decorating?  What we really need is some seasonal stuff in the store windows."
        The man shrugged again.  "I’ll try.  Always a first time."
        The sun had just slid down behind the White Tank Mountains when the man walked down the stairs of the Free Store into the parking lot to view his work from afar.  He went back inside to plug in the strings of salvaged Christmas tree lights he’d woven into the display.  Outside again he scrutinized the window.