A
N D
D O B B E R
'S
H E A D Dob sat on Pearlwick Road late of a hot summer's morning. His head hurt and he shunned the red heifer munching milkweed behind him. He was pretty dang mad, dog-dang it. The stump he sat on was pinching his rump, splinters made him squirm and fidget, but he was working fervidly on a thing or two and did not think to sit elsewhere. The dog-dang geechees down at Willy Jay's store, those datburn Boyetts and those toe-sucking Van Smittle twins, why Dob was ready to tell them all how to suck the bad persimmon. Nary a one was anything but a seed of Satan. His Nonny had warned him, hadn't she, warned him from her sickbed that Cayuga Ridge was a vile, Philistine place? It was almost a town wasn't it? And towns were mighty wicked. You didn't have to go to Bearcat Grammar to figure that out. Dob was nearly thirty and he'd never seen a thing that a hornbook or schoolhouse could teach him that was worth fiddling with. Only the greedy and the godless hellbound guttertrash would take their pleasures in movie magazines or goldlust or dog-dang cigarettes; that was all schools taught you. Well, didn't she tell him that too? And now he was the goat again. But he wasn't gonna be the goat for long, no sir, he'd get himself a box of sulphur and feed it to their mules in a sugarbeet or pee in their cisterns, maybe. He'd just get a big stick and chunk it at something or somebody or maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he'd just sit here and pray for a cholera or Bob Nottingham to come through town and strike them all dead. That would serve them. Then their snooty souls would rue the day they sneered at hocus-pocus. It
was that drummer. Fritzy. That gold-grubbing drummer. What could he possibly know about magic? Dob took the tract out of his pouch and read over
it again. He could barely shape the words
with his lips, but it was printed in pretty curly letters like her Old Testament stories,
saying,
Hadn't that drummer started it all by handing him this tract, right after Dob bought his Black Draught elixir from Willy Jay? Dob turned around and there that drummer stood flashing his teeth, sassy as you please, having just restocked Willy Jay's punchboard display and taken orders for Swede playing cards from the boys by the cold stove. Dob had seen the drummer before, had bought a trick bullfrog from him once in fact, and was happy enough to see him again. In nothing flat, that fat drummer Fritzy had a sample Master Loki Kit out of the bag and open while Dob picked his way gingerly through some big scary words on the tract.
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