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. When he played hooky from
school on Thursday it never occurred to him that he would be answerable
to the powers that be on Friday. Notwithstanding that he was a
sentinel he could never look ahead. And when Keekie Joe smoked several
of his father's cigarettes on the way home, it never occurred to him
that he would have to remain away from home through supper time, and
until his father had retired for the night.
Thus it was that at nine o'clock or thereabouts, Keekie Joe realized
that he was hungry and that four cigarettes stood between him and home,
effectually barring the way. He measured the licking that he would get
against the supper that he would get, and he decided to go fishing. No
doubt his choice was well considered for the supper that he would get
might not be a good one whereas the licking that he would get would be
nothing short of magnificent.
Keekie Joe had not the slightest idea how to cook a fish and he could
not think so far ahead as that. But food he must have. So he had dug
some worms and put them in one of his trick cans and then proceeded to
untangle the line. Having secured an unknotted length of five or six
feet he equipped this with a fish-hook of his own manufacture and
sallied forth toward the river. He was not only hungry, but sleepy,
and it never occurred to him that this was the exorbitant price of four
cigarettes.
Hunger and sleep vied with each other in the shuffling body of Keekie
Joe as he crossed Main Street and cut across the fields toward the
marshes.
Down by the river was a little shanty in which was a mass of fishing
seine. It stood hospitably open, for the hinges of the door were all
rusted away and the dried and shrunken boards lay on the marshy ground
before the entrance. Keekie Joe had intended to make sure that there
was nothing to eat in the shanty before casting his line in the
neighboring water. For there was the barest chance that a petrified
crust of bread, ancient remnant of some fisherman's lunch, might be in
the place.
Once Keekie Joe had found such a crust there. But the place was bare
now of everything except deserted spider-webs, black and heavy with
dust. These and the mass of net upon the ground were all that Keekie
Joe could see in the light of the genial moonbeams which shone through
the open doorway and wriggled in through the cracks in the
weather-beaten boards.
And now again Keekie Joe had to make a choice. He was hungry, oh, so
hungry. But he was sleepy, too, to the point of blinking
half-consciousness. The eyes which had so often watched for "cops,"
and which had won for Keekie Joe his nickname, were half closed and he
could hardly stand. Such a price for four cigarettes!
The eyes which had been so faithful to a doubtful trust and won the pay
of an apple core, could not be trusted now to stay open while he sat, a
ragged, lonely figure, on the shore dangling his line in quest of a
morsel to eat. It was funny how these eyes, which had served others so
well, seemed about to go back on their owner now. But so it was. And
then, in a moment, a very strange thing happened.
As Keekie Joe leaned against the doorway blinking his eyes, he happened
to look up at the moon and it seemed (probably because his eyes were
blinking), it _seemed_ as if the man in the moon winked at him, in a
way shrewdly significant as if he might have something up his sleeve.
Anyway, he could not keep his eyes open; sleep, for a little while at
least, had triumphed over hunger and the faithful little sentinel of
Barrel Alley stumbled over to the pile of net and sank down, exhausted,
upon it.
And Keekie Joe dreamed a dream. A most outlandish dream. He dreamed
that the licorice jaw-breaker which that strange boy had thrown at him
was the size of a brick, and that as it fell upon the ground it broke
into a thousand luscious fragments like the pane of plate-glass through
which Keekie Joe had lately thrown a rock. He picked up the fragments
and ate them, and there before him stood the strange, small boy, who
threw a sponge cake directly at his head and hit him with it _plunk_.
"Wotcher chuckin' dem at me fer?" Keekie Joe demanded menacingly.
But the small, strange boy (apparently without either fear or manners)
scaled a pumpkin pie at him and said, "Do you think I'm scared of you?"
He then squirted powdered sugar at him like poison gas and Keekie Joe
toppled backward off the fence and could not watch for cops, because
his eyes were full of powdered sugar. "Quit dat, d'yer hear!" he
screamed. But the small, strange boy threw a ham straight at him and
it fell on the ground with a thunderous crash and broke into a million
thin slices with mustard on them.
The noise of this falling meteor awoke Keekie Joe and he sat up,
holding the two sides of his head, startled and dizzy from hunger. And
shining through the doorway of the shack he saw a light. It was not
the moonlight, but another light, and he crept, light-headed and
fearful, toward the opening, ready to run in case it was a cop . . .