“No,” John said, with a big grin on his face.
“Well,” Patricia said. “If you don’t tell him neither will I and what Willard doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
“But what if Willard does find out? What then?” John said.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Patricia said.
“You’re pretty sure of yourself,” John said.
“We bowling trophies are a super race,” Patricia said. “Haven’t you noticed that yet?”
Some salve talk
Tension and boredom dominated the sleazy little hotel room the Logan brothers waited in. They hadn’t said anything to each other in a long lime. They just sat there. The frustrated beer-drinker Logan was feeling sorry for himself. Why couldn’t he have just one more beer? What difference did it make? If the bowling trophies had never been stolen then he wouldn’t have to sit here in this God-damn hotel room without a beer.
His older brother who had denied him the beer re quest now had his hand on the table beside the telephone. He alternately stared at his right hand and then at the telephone.
The comic-book-reading Logan was still fascinated by the salve ad. “Hey,” he said, looking up from the comic book to his brothers.
“What is it?” the denied beer-drinker Logan brother said.
“Yeah, what do you want?” the one beside the telephone said.
“Why didn’t we ever sell salve when we were kids?”
“What kind of salve?” the telephone Logan said.
“You know, for cuts and burns. Salve.”
“Where were we going to get this salve and who was going to buy it?” the telephone Logan said. He was really looking at his brother now, who was sitting up on the bed with an open comic book in his lap.
“We’d get it from the comic book here and sell it around the neighborhood to people.”
The beer-drinker Logan brother wanted a beer now more than ever. He smacked his lips. He could taste an imaginary beer in his mouth.
“What if they didn’t want to buy any salve? What would we do with the salve, then?” the telephone Logan said.
“It says here in the comic book that people want to buy salve. A lot of people.” He tried to show a picture in the comic book of people buying salve to his brother.
“That comic book is full of shit,” the telephone Logan said, paying no attention to the picture of people buying salve. “People don’t buy salve from kids. They buy it at the drugstore. Would you buy salve from some dumb kid if you had a burn? No, you’d go down to the drugstore. That’s where you get salve.”
“It says here—” the comic-book-reading Logan said, still persisting. He had done a lot of thinking about the salve ad.
“You don’t even know what’s in that salve. Do you? Come on, do you?”
“No, but—”
RRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG
The telephone rang.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
‘Fallen upon evil times’
“Well, if you’re not hungry, I think I’ll have something to eat,” Bob said. “I’m really hungry. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe you’re just hungry,” Constance said.
“That’s it,” Bob said. “That’s it all right.”
He looked over at Constance sitting at the kitchen table. Then he looked away. He didn’t like to see the rope marks on her wrists.
“I think I’ll see what’s in the refrigerator,” Bob said.
“That’s a good idea,” Constance said, without thinking.
Bob opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. After a while Constance noticed that he was still standing there with the door open, looking inside, and she knew that he had forgotten what he was doing, that he was hungry and looking for something to eat in the refrigerator, so she gently reminded him.
“Do you see anything in there you want to eat?”
Her words startled him.
He had totally forgotten why he was there.
He saw some spaghetti sauce.
“I think I’ll heat up this spaghetti sauce,” he said, taking a bowl of spaghetti sauce out of the refrigerator and then closing the door.
She watched to make sure that he got the spaghetti sauce out of the bowl and into a pan and onto the stove and that he also remembered to turn the gas burner on. When she made sure that he had done all of these things, she got up from the table and started out of the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Into the front room,” she said. “I think I’ll put some music on the phonograph. Anything you want to listen to?”
“No,” he said. “Play whatever you want. I’ll just listen to whatever’s playing.”
“OK.”
Constance went into the front room.
They had a large friendly-looking apartment that was cheerfully and creatively decorated with comfortable furniture, and many well-taken-care-of plants.
From looking at their place there was no way of knowing the things that went on in the bedroom: his awkward sadism. It was a very feminine, healthy-looking room because Constance had done most of the work on it. One would never have known that there were ropes hidden on hall closet shelves under blankets and that in the bedroom beautiful handkerchiefs and scarfs served the purpose of incompetent gags.
Also, hidden in the bedroom were bottles of medicine that he used to treat the warts in his penis, the warts that never went away. He had the bottles hidden in a box in the closet. There was stuff piled on top of the box as if it contained something the police were looking for.
Then there were of course the rubbers hidden under his socks in the dresser, the rubbers that he hated to buy, that always made him feel sick inside when he bought them, his ears burning with embarrassment and he never could look the person who sold him the rubbers in the eye. He always looked away.
He would check the drugstore out first to make sure that he would not have to buy the rubbers from a female clerk. He would only buy them from men. Bob even went so far as to make sure that there were no women in the store when he bought them. The rubbers were a descent into obscenity for him.
Bob watched his spaghetti sauce heat up. Red bubbles came slowly to the surface. He wondered what Constance was doing in the front room.
Their kitchen was large and friendly and filled with green growing things. He, she, they loved together green growing things.
Then he heard some music coming from the front room.
Bach.
Bob liked Bach.
It was nice of Constance to put something on the phonograph.
He waited for Constance to return to the kitchen. She didn’t come back, so he stirred the spaghetti sauce.
Yes, there was no way of knowing what was going on in that house. Nobody knew. Though he’d had the warts for almost a year now, he’d told nobody about them, not even his best friends.
The warts were his exile and his dungeon.
His friends worried about him because he was a nice guy. They were also disturbed by him endlessly reading to them from the Greek Anthology.
The Logan statues
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The Logan brothers sat there staring at the telephone. Not one of them moved an inch. They were statues of Logan brothers. Now that the telephone was finally ringing after all of these years, they didn’t know what to do.
The Logan who had done all of the telephone answering practice was the most helpless of all. His hand rested like marble beside the telephone.
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Spaghetti
Bob was eating when Constance came back into the kitchen. She had been gone for about ten minutes. He had poured the sauce over a couple slices of bread. “Where were you?” he said.
“I was in the front room,” she said.
“Oh,” he said.
There was a green container of Kraft Parmesan cheese on the table beside his plate, but there was no cheese on his spaghetti sauce bread. He had forgotten to use it.
He felt a little better looking at Constance now because the rope marks on her wrists were gone. Now he wouldn’t look away in embarrassment when she was around him.
She went over to the stove and put some water on for tea.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m putting some water on for tea,” Constance said. “I feel like a cup of tea.”
“That sounds good,” he said, eating a bite of red bread.
She went over to the table and sat down in a chair beside him. “You look tired,” she said, softly.
“That’s funny. I don’t feel tired,” Bob said.
How would you know? Constance thought. How would you ever know?
Matthew Brady
Patricia and John were busy making immortal love in the bedroom. She had really turned John on by pretending to be a bowling trophy. After a while she had gotten him laughing and for some reason or another sometimes it sexually aroused him and they were really going at love now.
Unbeknownst to them the ghost of Matthew Brady slipped supernaturally into the house and took a photograph of Willard and his bowling trophies. Matthew Brady posed them in such a way that Willard looked like Abraham Lincoln and the bowling trophies looked like his generals during the Civil War. There was a battlefield nearby but you couldn’t see it.
Willard was very serious in the photograph and so were the bowling trophies. They all played out their parts perfectly.
Matthew Brady left the apartment just about the time Patricia and John finished making famous love in the bedroom. They never saw him.
He disappeared back into the swirls of ghostly time, taking with him a photographic impression of Willard and his bowling trophies to be joined visually with the rest of American history because it is very important for Willard and his bowling trophies to be a part of everything that has ever happened to this land of America.
Marble to flesh
The marble hand of the Logan brother beside the telephone suddenly became living flesh and he picked up the telephone.
“Hello,” he said.
The other two brothers stared at the sound of the word hello as if it were a bolt of lightning in the air.
“NO!” he said, his face instantaneously flushing with anger. “This is not Jack’s Bar and Grill and I’m not Jack, you son-of-a-bitch. YOU BASTARD!” He started banging the receiver of the telephone on the table and the table fell over and the telephone made a huge ringing noise when it hit the floor.
The Logan brother was still sitting there, shouting “BASTARD! BASTARD!” at the receiver in his hand. He was making a lot of noise because he had just gone mad.
The other two Logan brothers threw themselves on him and held him down on the bed until he came to his senses. The comic-book-reading Logan hung up the telephone. Obviously, it was a wrong number. The person was still on the other end of the line, “Hello, Jack? Is that you, Jack? Don’t be mad, Jack. I’ll pay you back the five I owe you, Jack. Jack? Are you there, Jack? It’s only five—”
click
Three long years ago
The cows stopped eating to look at the Logan brothers.
Now one of them was stark raving mad in a cheap hotel room in San Francisco. His two brothers held him on the bed, trying to quiet him down.
“What are we going to do now?” one of the Logan brothers said, staring back at a cow.
It was just spring in Colorado and the day, though warm, had a slight crispness to it. The sky was clear and blue. The little town of Middle Fork was in a small valley and mountains towered up around it.
“I don’t know,” was one reply.
“Find the bowling trophies,” was the other reply. It was a very stern reply. It had come from the brother who was now being held down on the bed until he came to his senses.
“Where do we look?” said the Logan who had started the conversation. He was the brother who liked to read comic books. He was still staring at the cow. He was staring at the cow in the same way that he read comic books.
“It doesn’t make much difference where we look,” his stern brother answered, surrounded by America in every direction. “Just as long as we keep looking until we find the trophies.”
Finally, he was quiet on the bed in the hotel room. He was very quiet. “I’m OK,” he said, in a slow calm voice. “It’s all right now.”
Spaghetti bread tears
A forkful of spaghetti bread was halfway to Bob’s mouth moving along at a regular eating motion. One does not know how many miles per hour a fork travels when you are eating but his fork was moving at a normal speed when suddenly it slammed on its brakes in his hand and came to a screeching halt halfway to Bob’s mouth.
Tears slowly started ebbing from his eyes and flowing down his cheeks. He had started crying. The tears became low slow sobbing while the fork remained half way to his mouth with a bite of spaghetti bread resting precariously upon it.
“What is it?” Constance said, reaching over and taking the fork from Bob’s hand and putting it down on the plate in front of him.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
He didn’t say anything.
He just sat there continuing to cry.
Constance reached over and took his hand in her hand. “What is it, baby? Tell me what it is.”
Bob just keep crying.
Constance didn’t try to find out any more from him why he was crying. She continued holding his hand but she left him alone in his sorrow.
The plate of spaghetti bread looked silly in front of a grown man crying. Constance didn’t like to sit there holding his hand as he cried with that plate of stuff in front of them. It hurt her dignity and put Bob in a bad light, too.
She gently let go of Bob’s hand and reached over and picked up the plate of spaghetti bread and got up and took it over to the sink.
Then she returned to Bob’s hand again.
He cried for ten minutes.
Constance didn’t say anything more.
She waited for Bob to stop crying.
Kansas
The Logan brothers spent that night in Middle Fork nosing around but they couldn’t find any clues to why the house that the bowling trophies were supposed to be in wasn’t there.
Besides that, people looked at them as if they were a little crazy. “That’s a pasture out there,” an old-timer said to them, looking at them very carefully in the town bar. They waited for him to say something else about the pasture but that was it. The Logan brothers felt a little uncomfortable. They said thank you and tried to find somebody else who could help them.
The old man told the story many times about the three strangers asking if there was a house out there and he said, “ ‘No, that’s a pasture out there,’ and then you know what they said to me? They said thank you for me telling them what they had seen with their very own eyes.”
The old man always laughed when he finished telling the story about the three strangers who came into town looking for a house that was a pasture. “Yeah, they thanked me for telling them that,” and whomever he’d told the story to would laugh along with him.
“I just don’t know what the world’s coming to,” would be the final period at the end of the story.
The next day the Logan brothers left for Kansas. They had no reason to believe that the bowling trophies were in Kansas but they had to
look some place and Kansas was just as good as any other place.
The Matthew Brady echo
Patricia and John were lying quietly beside each other in bed. They were very contented from their lovemaking. John had forgotten that he was tired and Patricia’s mind was drained of all passion like an empty swimming pool in the winter.
“Did you hear something in the other room?” Patricia said finally, after a long peaceful time.
“No,” John said. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“I thought I heard something,” Patricia said.
“Well, I didn’t hear anything,” John said. “What did you hear? What did it sound like?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
John reached over and touched Patricia’s hair. It felt beautiful in the dark.
“Maybe it was your imagination,” he said.
A change of plans
After the brief violent outburst from the oldest Logan brother, the little hotel room had been returned to normal and the Logan brothers had gone back to waiting again for the telephone to ring and a voice to tell them where the bowling trophies were.
The Logan brother who had lost his cool wasn’t sitting by the telephone any more. He had changed places on the bed with the comic-book-reading Logan who’d forgotten his comic book when they moved.
He was going to ask his brother to hand him the comic book but his brother was reading it now and he felt that it was better not to disturb him.
The comic-book-reading Logan had hurt his wrist in the wrestling match with his totally berserk brother and he thought that it was best just to let things be and for his brother to read the comic book in his stead.
The beer-drinker Logan still wanted a beer but he knew he wouldn’t get one until the evening’s activities were over and so . . . he felt sort of hopeless.
The telephone Logan who was now the comic book-reading Logan was absent-mindedly staring at the same salve ad that he had put his brother down for reading a little while ago, but he really didn’t see the ad. It was just color and motion in his hands. He was actually thinking about the bowling trophies and the people who had stolen them. He was thinking very hard and very grimly about them.
Willard and His Bowling Trophies Page 5