A brief advertisement to potential tourists during the Great Depression precedes Chapter 1. It tells the reader that Key West, where the story takes place, is a perfect vacation spot due to its warm temperatures and lack of dust and smoke, especially in winter when it rarely rains.

A time stamp indicates that the setting is July 1934. Beans is the 10-year-old first-person narrator of the story, and his version of Key West is quite different from the travel brochure’s text. He mentions streets, where garbage lies in “rotting mounds” (2), and stray dogs and rats are everywhere. The town is too poor for a trash collector; Beans’s own family is too poor for new pants, so his mother patches holes repeatedly. As the chapter opens, Beans and 8-year-old brother Kermit use Beans’s red wagon to take 20 condensed milk cans they dug out of the garbage heaps, rinsed, and cleaned to Winky, a man with slick hair who resells the used cans to the local Cuban restaurant Pepe’s Café.

Beans argues with Winky; the deal was 20 cans for a dime, but now Winky claims the deal was always 50 cans. He offers a nickel, and as Kermit is hungry, Beans eventually gives in and takes it.