Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Presently the young man got up without a parting word and walked to the front of the bus and sat down with a booted blonde who might easily have been an habitué of the Wing-Ding Club.

This enlivening encounter occupied Bair’s mind for the rest of what proved a tiresomely uneventful trip; moreover, the meeting had served to demolish any lingering illusions that he still projected the image, despite his rags, of a man of substance; he began to feel like a bum. He didn’t like the feeling at all.

They’d been given little in the way of a briefing at the Center, merely instructions to pretend they were men down on their luck. Upon reaching Grimley, Bair had expected to find a Skid Row with no lack of accommodations where one could spend the night for fifty cents or a dollar in the company of fellow unfortunates with whom he would take pains to relate and empathize, distasteful and pointless an exercise as it seemed.

To his dismay, the few people who passed on the dingy streets were fairly well-dressed and had respectable working-class faces that regarded Bair with frank distrust; he had a scary vision of wandering like this for a month, a seemingly homeless pariah. Furthermore, it was cold, and he suspected the presence of a river, for the lazy wind blowing from the east carried a faint stench of pollution, like the smell oozing out of sewer grates on cold winter nights.

Bair thought of the matchbook cover and Deuce, but doubted the youth would be interested in extending the sort of Christian hospitality he required. Staring into bar windows, he saw charming scenes of good fellowship, reminding him sadly of his companions at the Center; not that he considered for a moment entering any of these bars, fancying that some ineluctable air of superiority would invite waves of silent hostility.

He ended up spending that first night on a bench in the bus depot, and next morning greeted the bad news of his whiskery face in the rest-room mirror with dull mortification. When the restaurant opened, he slunk to a stool at the far end of the counter and ordered orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee, knowing it was stupid to blow that much of his five bucks on his first meal, but finding it imperative to appease the glowering disapproval of the waitress.

As he was paying his bill, he looked up and caught a glimpse of Deuce through the window, or someone who looked a lot like Deuce, but when Bair reached the street there was no sign of the young man.

Bair was tempted to catch the next bus back to the Center; his return ticket was in his pocket. What a joy it would be to vent his indignation on the director for being given a ticket to a town where there were simply no down-and-outers to be down and out among. He would demand another city: New York or L.A. or even Pittsburgh, any city with a high enough level of culture and prosperity to include a sizable slum district. But what was the use? The director ruled the Center like a benevolent despot. Bair lifted his head. If this was a test, he would pass it!

He wandered into a cemetery so vast it seemed to confirm his suspicion that most of the townspeople were already dead. Beneath a sycamore tree, Bair sat down to rest on an iron bench. Unlike in the bus depot, here among the silent sleeping dead it was warmly agreeable to relax and watch the squirrels cavorting among the tombstones. If all else failed, Bair proposed to spend the coming night here.

He awoke from a snooze to spy an old man in a tattered mackinaw rummaging in a trash bin from which he rescued a handful of fairly fresh-looking flowers and ferns.

Startled when Bair rose from the bench and confronted him, the old man clung to the rim of the can as if expecting Bair to wrestle it away from him. “This’n’s mine, mister,” he growled.

“Oh, quite, quite. I don’t want it, I’m sure.” The fellow had sparked a gleam of hope in Bair’s eyes. Who but a derelict could be reduced to scavenging for flowers in trash bins, no doubt in hopes of peddling them.

Ignoring Bair, the man dipped once more into the bin, extracted a bouquet of faded plastic roses. With a savage roar he flung it to the ground, as if it represented one more trick an unkind fate had played upon him.

Once having overcome the old man’s suspicion, Bair was allowed to accompany him into town, where a woman setting up a flower stall by the First National Bank was prevailed upon to buy the derelict’s offering for fifty cents. Moments later, Bair was sharing a booth with his newfound friend in a diner under the viaduct.