The Wal-Mart cash register intones the familiar beep as bread, turkey, cookies, chips, and plastic gloves slide past the scanner.

UI graduate Mitch Moylan pays the $35.02 bill, but the food isn’t for him or a Friday night party. It’s going toward the free-sandwich stand he and UI graduate student Ukpong Eyo run every Friday afternoon.

The two meet once a week at the Campus Christian Fellowship, then carry a card table and a blue food-stuffed cooler to the Pedestrian Mall. As they set up the table, a line of “regulars” are always awaiting their Friday sandwich.

Reliable patrons and some passersby bump elbows with gloved Moylan and Eyo as they approach the table, a friendly greeting Moylan said they created to keep the gloves sanitary.

When the project began in last May, the sandwich fates were not well aligned. It was raining, and the stand drew some unwanted attention.

“That day the cops came out, and they gave us a hard time,” Eyo said, describing how the police insisted they buy a license to give away food. “We understood. The cops are there to protect. [The customers] were thinking the cops were out to spoil all the fun.”

The men checked into getting a license, which, they said, would have cost them hundreds of dollars.

The two sandwich men are individually associated with the Campus Christian Fellowship, and their faith played a prominent role in the creation of the booth. But they did not want people to feel as though there were religious preconditions involved in accepting food.

“When we started out, we wanted to do the good thing,” Eyo said, his voice possessing a slight accent from the Nigerian home he left six years ago. “We didn’t want it to be like we were trying to buy them. The best we could do was to get to know them, get to know their names.”

After a year of handing out sandwiches, the pair can count on always seeing certain regulars, including Marvin Morley, 50, who has two sandwiches named after him.

One of those sandwiches is the Marvin Sandwich — a regular sandwich with chips in the middle, Eyo said.

“Only way to eat them,” Morley said, shrugging as he took a big, crunchy bite. “It all goes down the same way.”

Morley also originated the Duane Sandwich — Mayo and chips on a slice of bread — which he proudly exhibited as he sat on a bench beneath a tree. He is a frequent visitor to the stand, attending all but two Fridays since its start, he said.

When students begin to don hats and gloves and the leaves above the table change color and drop, the customary menu is exchanged for warm chili.

“When it started getting cold last year, sandwiches and cold drinks didn’t seem to be right,” Moylan said. “We cooked up a whole Crock-Pot of chili, cut up some onions and cheese.”

Not all meals go to the regulars, nor are they exclusively for the homeless. But for many who receive the sandwiches, they are a welcomed sustenance that fill up empty stomachs.

Debora Gustafson, 50, said she was coming back to the Ped Mall from a Mid-Eastern Council on Chemical Abuse class when she realized she only had enough money for a cup of coffee.

“I said to [my friend], ‘I’m broke.’ Then this guy comes in, and he says, ‘They’re handing out sandwiches on the Pedestrian Mall,’ ” Gustafson said through the haze of smoke in the Tobacco Bowl, 111 S. Dubuque St. “I was surprised, but it just goes to show you, random acts of kindness just come around.”