Chapter 1 - The Lonely Gun
J. R. "BOB" Dobbs turned his horse at the edge of the river and held it there, half-facing into the sun rising across the Texas sands. His perpetual grin broadened no les than an inch on each side as the early-morning roses of dawn struck his eyes like the careless favors of a drunken woman and burned there merrily like a rain ofr flaming hailstones. For a second the world held its breath and Dobbs held his as well - then the sun burst over the horizon, glowing like the edge of a molten-hot penny freshly minted and flung into the sky.
"BOB" smiled and smiled some more as he turned his horse and rode into the quick, shallow-running iver. It had been a long, long cattle-crive, but at last he was headed home to Mother Dobbs. And with a season's pay in his breast pocket, those bankers ought to give them no more trouble about the mortgage!
Dobbs rode east, reflecting on his lurid past. His father had been a snake-oil salesman from St. Louis, a man of uncompromising bad taste and a bastion of moral turpitude in his community. Old Elijah Q. Dobbs had taken to preaching for a while, and folks had thought him a regular child-prodigy, so full of the spirit was he, until it was discovered that most of the young women and more than a few of the old wives and widows about town had caught fire with the spirit themselves and were even now bending their thoughts to the rearing of further child-prodigies. "BOB", ever-smiling, swept away a tear as he gave consideratino to the plight of his father.
Poor old Elijah Dobbs! He faced a mob of angry fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands, all of them out for his blood, not to mention the mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives who claimed first priority on his more pertinent body fluids. Under the circumstances he did the only brave, honorable thing he could and ran like hell to the jungles of Florida where he disappeared for several years.
Only to reappear, bearded and wild, with a gleam in his eye and a bottle in his hand. It was an historic moment, if only the world known to notice: there in the calloused hand of Elijah Q. Dobbs was the first ever bottle of genuine American snake oil, forerunner of so many imitators, soon to bear a patent number and the garish, gleaming, bleary-eyed seal of Elijah Dobbs!
From Florida Elijah traveled the country, selling his miracle-cure all-purpose tonic for a mere two bits the pint-jar, ingredient being nine parts hair-of-the-dog, nine tenths of a part sparkling pure water, and one teeny weeny little drob of a secret ingredient for which the scientific world had no name. Elijah sold his medicine to all: cancerous old women and hemerrhoidal little men, to nubile young farmer's daughters in pretty gingham dresses and red-ribboned ponytails eager to take a swig of anything in the blistering, dusty heat of the hayloft and to young street toughs plaing dice and killing each other over nickles on some god-forsaken corner of Hell's Kitchen. Word got around and one day Elijah realized it was time to open a factory and start exploiting the foreigners before they all got radicalized and wouldn't work anymore.
Then tragedy struck. Dobbs went to the local Dallas post office to find a ltter from the U.S. Patent Office. It seems that he had misfiled his patent and, unless he acted without delay, his rights to the product would be sold to the highest bidder in a government auction to be held without notice whenever the highest bidder showed up. Elijah leapt aboard the nearest train and high-tailed it for Washington, but by the time he got there it was too late: some oil-tycoon had snatched it up the moment it hit the market - mere seconds before he walked through the door, coincidentally - and no word had been heard since.
Poor old Elijah Dobbs! Shot down in his prime, he was a broken man. His first stop was a saloon, and some say he is still there to this day trying desperately to cnofigure the grotesqueries of fate that allowed his strand of fortune to be misapprehended by a man who already had plenty of his own. Others, with a nervous glance over their shoulders, whispered that Elijah had sat in that bar, drunk and going on about Trees of Liberty and the Blood of Tyrants until a mysterious stranger had led him into the back room where gunfire was exchanged. In any event, no one knew or was willing to say where he was today.
Still, he was not a man who had made no mark on the world, had he but known it. While in Dallas he had been approached by a respectable-looking farmer who begged him to see if the snake-oil would help save his daughter's life. Elijah followed the man back to a small house outside of town where he found Jane McBride delirious and weak in a small bedroom. He immediately recognized it as a case of demonic possession and insisted that he be left alone with her, enjoining her parents to go to the next room and pray like they never had. For days the old couple clung to one another in terror as they listened to the shrieks and squeals and the horrible slamming of the bedframe against the wall, but when it was all over Jane emerged with a delightful glow on her face and a bottle of snake-oil in her hand. Her parents were delighted to have her back, but made no argument when Elijah explained a few days later that he had to go.
It had seemed an incident of little consequence at the time, but their trysting was to bear fruit in the way of all good and worthy endeavors. Jane was far from scandalized and not a bit put out by this turn of events, owing her life to Elijah's miracle-cure as she did, and so she set out to raise the boy on her own until such time as his father saw fit to come back and lend a helping hand. As no-one could say for sure that he wasn't using it and because it seemed like the right thing to do, she did borrow his name just long enough to tag onto her son's birth-certificate.
The tears running freely now, Dobbs removed his stetson and pulled back the brim. There, on carefully folded oilpaper, was the recipe for snake-oil, the one legacy his father had left his son. "Good ol' Dad!" Dobbs chuckled. "Always thinking of others before himself!"
The cattle drive had been long and hard. To make matters worse, "BOB" was utterly without a sense of direction so he wandered far afield on the return trip from Kansas City. Many times he had been chased off some old pioneer's land with curses and gunfire. When it occurred to him that the pioneers were no longer woodsmen but settled farmers, and that they weren't speaking English, "BOB" realized that he was in Mexico and turned back toward the Rio Grande. From there he meandered back towards the northeast and his home in Dallas.
* * *
Actually, it was Jane Dobbs who had left the snake-oil legacy to "BOB"; old Elijah, normally a man who couldn't have kept a secret in a morgue, had been about as loose with that recipe as a constipated anal-retentive with his excreta. Nevertheless, she'd gotten it out of him, although it did take a little doing; she'd kept him awake in her bedroom for three days with drink and whatever variations on the coital act a creative young farmgirl could devise. When he finally went to sleep she stole the recipe out of the brim of his hat and copied it down on a piece of oil paper by the light of a kerosene lamp. Although her methods were less than perfectly honest, her motivations were beyond reproach: she wanted to make sure that if somebody stole the original Elijah would have a spare.
She'd planned to tell him if he ever needed it, but of course he disappeared never to return, and then J. R. came along and she forgot all about it. When, the day "BOB" turned 17, she found it in a locket Elijah had given her the day before he left, she took it as a signal of divine intent. It so happened that she had just spent her last penny on the mortgage and had been searching desperately for something hockable that she might honor the birth of her son in an appropriate manner. Finding the locket solved the problem.
She came downstairs to where J. R. sat by the fire reading a book he'd borrowed from their nearest neighbor, a little old lady who lived five miles down the road. She paused by the door and beamed proudly at her only child, her son, J. R. "BOB" Dobbs, watching the flames cast dancing lights and shadows across his face. he took a long draw on his pipe and then looked up.
"Hey, Ma!" he cried, standing.
"J. R." She balled the locket and chain up in her fist and put her hand behind her back. "I swear, if I didn't know any better I'd think you were born with that old pipe in your face!"
"BOB" chuckled bashfully. "Aw, shucks, Ma! A man's gotta have a pipe, you know!"
She smiled at him, a little sadly. "Yes, that's so. And you are a man now." It was true. All he had done for years was eat and grow, eat and grow, and he showed no sign of slowing down. Already he was too big for the britches she'd made for him only a few months before. She sighed.
" "BOB", you never knew your father," she began awkwardly. "I've told you about him, what I know of him, but that just isn't the same as knowing him. If you knew him you'd understand what I mean." "BOB" listened attentively to his mother. Ordinarily a cheerful, happy woman, today her eyes were touched with a certain pensiveness, as of someone too caught up in memories of happy days gone by to fully appreciate the simple pleasures of today.
Jane paused for a moment, becoming quietly reverent before she continued. "I have soemthing for you, "BOB". A present from your father and I. Something I know he'd want you to have. It's one of a kind and it's terribly valuable so please, please don't keep it in the brim of your hat!" With that she handed the locket to him.
"BOB" took the tiny silver locket in his hand. "Gee, Ma, it's beautiful!"
"Not the locket, "BOB", what's inside it."
"Oh," he grinned opening the locket. "Silly me!" He pulled out the tiny piece of oil paper and began unfolding it. The script was tiny and all but illegible, but well-preserved nonetheless. "BOB" studied it carefully before refolding it and tucking it into the brim of his hat. "What is it?"
"It's a recipe for snake-oil, the best money could buy!" Jane suddenly became animated, excited about her pseudo-husband's achievement. "Why, "BOB", that snake oil'd cure anything! Got a wart? A little drop of that elixir'll dry it up inside of an hour! Any burgeoning malignant tumours filling your bloodstream with poison? One teaspoonful in the morning and they'll be transmogrified into healthy organs in a week's time!
"But the best thing about," she said, her voice dropping from a huckster's chant to confidant's murmur, "the best thing about it is that if you take a teaspoonful every morning noon, and evening you'll never get sick." her voice had become dreamy and she was staring off into space, her eyes glowing with fervent conviction in the light of the fire. "Elijah even suspected that it would make a body healthier if taken regularly over an extended period of time...."
"BOB" hated to seem ungrateful, especially when the gift was of such obvious significance to his mother, but he couldn't help making a face. He hated medicine! "How does it taste?" he asked dubiously.
Jane's eyes came back into focus again, bright and strong, her face animated and radiant. "Like the very nectar of the gods, J. R.! It's delicious! Kid's'll drink it and beg for more! It's not like medicine at all; it's like candy!" She smiled, realizing what her boy had been thinking. "You are just like your father, young man! He hated medicine, couldn't stand the stuff! When he got drunk enough he used to rant about how anything good for you ought to feel good for you, and that if it didn't it probably was not good for you, and that he'd met a man who actually got a kick out of having cancer, and that he lived for twenty years with a goddam tumour the size of an eight pound cannonball hanging out of his goddamned ear!"
"BOB" was smiling again, much relieved. "Why didn't you ever make any?"
Jane frowned again, concentrating. There's a secret ingredient: I never could find it. I think your father discovered it in Florida, from the Indians there. I've never heard of it anywhere else, although I've asked doctors and chemists everywhere I've been. They just laughed."
"What's it called?" "BOB" asked, upset by the idea of anyone laughing at his mother and suddenly determined to find this mystery-ingredient, whatever it may be.
His mother turned to him with a grave-yet-mirthful look on her face. " 'Frop."
* * *
But "BOB" never found it, although he'd asked everybody he met and had been laughed at more than a few times himself. Still, he never really gave up on it and still hoped he'd find it someday.
As he sat by the campfire his thoughts turned to the question-mark that was his father. His mother had told him much about the man, including the details popularly described as "sordid", for Jand was an unconventional woman and hoped her son would be an unconventional man. "BOB" had decided long ago that he must be just that, since everyone else seemed to go around thinking the their life was an intolerable burden to be borne only because the alternative was so terrifying. There, however, lay another riddle: "BOB" wondered why these people, most of whom believed in an afterlife that was all easy money, fast women, and good yet cheap whiskey so dreaded the thought of dying.
Once he'd asked a fellow cowhand during the campfire discussion. "Why are you afraid to die?"
"What're you, nuts?" the fellow said, edging away from him.
"No, really," "BOB" pressed, noticing with chagrin that the man was genuinely alarmed by the question. "I'm just curious. What's so bad about being dead?"
"Jesus Christ, bub, haven't you ever seen a stiff?" The calfroper stood up and brushed the dust off his denims. Suddenly he was angry and afraid, without knowing why. "You know what? I don't like you. You're always going around asking stupid questions with that stupied pipe stuck in that stupid grin of yours. What have you got to be happy about? That's my question."
But before "BOB" had a chance to tell him the big gruff cowboy gathered up his things and quickly walked away, leaving "BOB" to sit by the fire by himself. For the rest of the drive no-one would associate with him, and when one night the sky filled with bright, quick-moving lights and the dawn brought with it the horror of a few dozen horribly mutilated cattle, "BOB" got the blame and they sent him packing, even though it was obvious that no-one in the camp possessed either the equipment or the surgical skill necessary to have made such a gorily excellent job of it. After that "BOB' refrained from asking such questions of strangers.
And indeed the world was full of strangers, "BOB" himself being the strangest of them all, perhaps. He certainly knew no-one very well, save his mother. Even his father was just a name in an oft-told tale. If that didn't qualify a man for stranger-hood, what did?
"BOB" relit his pipe and pulled out his guitar. Nothing better than a good song to chase away the blues, or so he'd always held. He knew he wasn't much of a musician and he'd even been kicked out of a church in Illinois once they'd heard him sing. It was the only time he'd ever been in a church - his mother hadn't taken him, but he felt the need to see what all the fuss was about after that first ill-fated cattle drive - and they'd tell him nothing more than that he was embarassing everybody in front of God and would he please leave? Still, he was alone now and he liked to sing, so he tuned up his guitar and opened up with a few cowboy songs, improvising wildly whenever he didn't know the words.
He went on like that for an hour, making up the words as he went along and forgeting them just as easily, never noticing the collection of blinking lights gathering above him in the sky. They circled above him playfully, dipping and swerving and playing "tag" with one another until at last the fir began to die down and "BOB" 's head began to nod. When at last he tamped out his pipe and began to undo his bedroll, most of the lights winked once and shot off into the night, leaving only a few hovering above him like a distant halo.
Just before dawn, the lights began to circle, moving faster and fast until their light-trails merged into a spinning blur of color. Then they shot off in different directions, leaving an after-image that was something like a five-pointed star.
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