THE DREAM OF KEEKIE JOE On that night, in the back yard of Billy Gilson's tire repair shop, Keekie Joe, the sentinel of Barrel Alley, sat upon a pile of old Ford radiators, untangling a complicated mass of fishing-line.

He was trying to follow a selected strand through the various fastnesses of the labyrinth.
The involved mass was really not a fishing-line but, in its untangled state, an apparatus for confounding and enraging pedestrians.
Stretched across the sidewalk between two tin cans its function was to catch in the feet of passersby, thus pulling the clamorous cans about the ankles of the victim.

Keekie Joe had always found this game diverting and he was wont to vary its surprises by filling the cans with muddy water.
But on this eventful night he was driven to dismantle the apparatus and consecrate it to a new use.

For Keekie Joe was hungry and he dared not go home; so he was going fishing.
The hours following the crap game had not been golden hours for the sentinel of Barrel Alley.

When he emerged from the tenement and rejoined Pee-wee after the episode of the crap game, he had ten cents that his father had given him with which to buy a package of cigarettes.
Keekie Joe was never able to consider consequences at a distance of more than ten minutes into the future.