Willard and His Bowling Trophies

by Richard Brautigan

  Then he looked up from the comic book to the telephone. The telephone was not ringing. It was just a strange black silent object on a table.

  “Let’s kill them,” he said.

  “What?” the brother by the telephone said.

  “I said, let’s kill them.”

  “Kill who?”

  “You know who. The bastards who stole our bowling trophies. They don’t deserve to live. Look what they’ve done to us. They’ve made us into animals. We’re just animals now. Fucking animals.”

  “You mean, you want to kill them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you think?” the one by the telephone asked the Logan who didn’t have a beer in his hand but wanted one to be there and not having a beer in his hand suddenly made him very mad.

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s kill them.”

  If he’d had a beer, cold and comfortable, in his hand he would not have wanted to kill them. He would have said instead, “No, let’s just beat the shit out of them and get our trophies and go home.”

  But because he didn’t have a can of beer in his hand, he said, “Sure, let’s kill them.”

  Now two Logan brothers were staring at the Logan brother who was sitting beside the telephone but would have preferred to be a child, selling salve to his neighbors and earning lots of money selling something that made people feel better when they used it and afterwards thought kindly of him for selling the salve to them.

  “OK,” he said, because he always did what his brothers did.

  “Then it’s settled,” the Logan with the comic book on his lap said.

  “Are you reading that comic book?” his brother asked him.

  “No.”

  “Then can I read it?”

  “Sure.” His brother handed him the comic book and he immediately turned to the salve ad. Before he lost himself in the ad again, he thought for a moment about killing the people who’d stolen the bowling trophies. He’d never killed anybody before. He turned the comic book a few pages to some characters in the comic book who were killing each other. They were using axes and it was very bloody. A hand was lying on the floor. The hand did not look happy.

  He looked up from the comic book to his brother on the bed. “How are we going to kill them?” he asked.

  “We’ll shoot them.”

  “Good,” he said, and turned from the people in the comic book with the axes back to the salve ad. He liked the people in the salve ad because they were happy selling salve.

  In his mind he pressed a doorbell.

  It rang pleasantly and somebody came to the door. It was an older man. The man looked like his grandfather except that he had red hair.

  “Hello,” the man said. “What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Johnny Logan and I’m selling salve.”

  “Come on in, Johnny. It’s hot out there. I’ll get you a big glass of lemonade and then you tell me all about this salve. And if it sounds like good stuff, I’ll buy a couple of tubes of it, and give you the names and addresses of some friends of mine who live nearby and might be interested in some salve.”

  “We’ll shoot them in the heart,” his brother said.

  “That’s good,” he said, without looking up from the comic book.

  “Here’s your lemonade, son. Now tell me what kind of salve you’ve got here. If it’s good salve, I don’t care how much it costs.”

  “This is the best salve in the world. It’s made in Chicago, Illinois.”

  “Right in the fucking heart.”

  ‘These things began, ‘tis said, with our fathers’

  “I’m dying because of all those Greeks,” Bob said.

  His face was so full of tears that there wasn’t room for another tear. He tried to find enough room for one more tear but he couldn’t find it, so he stopped crying.

  “What Greeks?” Constance said, and as the words left her mouth, she knew what Greeks. It was those Greeks. She wished that she hadn’t asked the question.

  “The ones in the Greek Anthology,” Bob said.

  “What about them?” Constance said, and then realized that she’d said it. She felt as if she’d subconsciously set a trap for herself and then fallen into it

  “They’re dead,” Bob said.

  Two kitchens

  John and Patricia decided that they wanted a little snack before they went to sleep. It was close to midnight and their normal bedtimes. They were hungry from the sexual exercise they had just gone through.

  “What time is it?” John said.

  Patricia looked at the clock beside the bed because John couldn’t see it from where he was lying in the bed.

  “It’s almost twelve,” she said.

  “Well, let’s go get a snack and come back here and eat it in bed while I watch a little of the Johnny Carson show,” John said.

  “Everything’s back to normal,” Patricia said, jumping out of bed and wiggling her ass at John.

  “HHHHHHHHEEEEEEERRRRRRRREEEEEEE’’’’’’’’’SSSSSS, Johnny!”

  “You don’t have to watch him if you don’t want to,” John said.

  “I’m going to dance with Willard instead,” Patricia said. “He knows how to show a girl a good time. He does a great two-step.”

  She started dancing around the room, pretending that she was holding Willard in her arms. She acted as if she were dodging something with her head. “Watch out for your beak, Willard,” she said.

  John went into the kitchen. He didn’t bother to put any clothes on. He was hungry. Patricia joined him a moment later. She didn’t have any clothes on either: not a stitch. Her body was quite adequate. John was a little overweight He had a slight potbelly, but he didn’t give a damn. His whole family ran toward being a little overweight and so he was used to it and considered that he was carrying on a family tradition by having a potbelly.

  He was thirty-one years old.

  Patricia was six years younger.

  They got along very well together and had been doing so for almost five years. He was a filmmaker and she was a school teacher.

  He worked with visions and she taught Spanish.

  They were pleased with what they did with their lives.

  Patricia and John’s kitchen was directly underneath Bob and Constance’s kitchen and they were at this moment all in their own kitchens.

  Upstairs Bob was mourning people who had been dead for over two thousand years. Constance was trying to console him. Tears were slowly drying on his face.

  Downstairs John was making a turkey sandwich. He was pulling off pieces of meat from an ornate-looking turkey carcass on the table.

  Patricia was pouring out big glasses of ice-cold milk to go with the sandwiches while they watched the Johnny Carson show in the bedroom, and as soon as she finished with her sandwich and glass of milk, she would be fast asleep and John would stay up with Johnny Carson for a little while and then he would join her in sleep.

  “Lots of white meat on mine,” Patricia said. “And don’t short me on the mayonnaise.”

  “Have I ever done that to you?” John said.

  “No, but there’s always a first time for everything.”

  “Jesus,” he said at exactly the same time that upstairs in the kitchen above them, Bob said, “I don’t want to cry any more for dead people.”

  Constance tried to think of something to console him but she couldn’t think of anything, so she remained silent, sitting beside him at the table, holding his hand.

  Of course Bob and Constance couldn’t hear what Patricia and John were saying downstairs and neither of the couples knew what the other couple was doing.

  That’s one of the strange things about people living in apartment buildings. They barely know what anybody else is doing. The doors are made out of mystery,

  “More mayonnaise and more pepper,” Patricia said.

  “Don’t think about it anymore,” Constance sai
d.

  A visit to Kansas

  The Logan brothers spent six months in Kansas looking for the stolen bowling trophies. They looked very carefully in Topeka, Dodge City, Wichita, Kansas City, etc,

  etc, etc, etc,

  cities, cities of Kansas:

  Reserve,

  Ulysses,

  Pretty Prairie,

  and Gas, Kansas.

  They looked in the windows of houses in quiet residential neighborhoods. Maybe the person who stole the trophies was a show-off and wanted people to see the trophies in his front window like a Christmas tree.

  They looked under bridges and in wheat fields.

  They hung around bowling alleys, deliberately overhearing conversations, hoping that they might find a clue in listening to bowlers talking to each other. Maybe one of them would spill the beans but it all came to nothing.

  The Logan brothers spent the money that they had taken with them when they left home and they didn’t want to get jobs because that would take away valuable time from looking for the bowling trophies.

  So they became minor thieves: shoplifting, breaking into parked cars, newspaper-rack coin boxes, etc. One night in Pretty Prairie they stole a rug off the clothes line in somebody’s backyard and stepped in a bed of flowers.

  “Watch out for the flowers.”

  “Oh, shit! I stepped on them.”

  “Big feet!”

  That’s the kind of stuff the Logan brothers were doing.

  Before the bowling trophies were stolen, they had never engaged in activities like this. They were honest and looked up to as heroes, and all the mothers in town wanted their sons to grow up and be like the Logan brothers and be champion bowlers.

  Toward an understanding of

  television and sleep

  Patricia and John nakedly took big turkey sandwiches and glasses of ice-cold milk into the bedroom. They were doing a very good imitation of American health.

  John turned the television set on and Johnny Carson popped into the room, like a firecracker on the TV screen. He had just finished telling a joke and everybody was laughing except the guest sitting next to him. The guest was not laughing. The guest looked very dour.

  Ed McMahon, Carson’s cohort, then said something and the guest smiled and Johnny Carson brought up a subject that really interested the guest.

  The subject was the guest and the guest immediately started talking about the guest and then everything was running smoothly. John liked to watch this kind of stuff before he went to sleep. It helped him sleep better. He used to have a little trouble falling asleep but the Johnny Carson show had changed that. After twenty or thirty minutes of the Johnny Carson show, he was ready to sleep like a babe.

  “We have three turkey sandwiches,” Patricia said.

  “What do you mean?” John said.

  Patricia motioned her head toward the TV set. She didn’t like television very much. She had never had any problem sleeping at night, so she just didn’t understand.

  Dust

  All of Bob’s tears were dry now and turning to dust on his cheeks. It was a little after midnight. He and Constance were totally exhausted. There wasn’t a single emotion left for them to feel.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Bob said.

  “All right,” Constance said.

  They got up from the kitchen table and went into the hall. Constance was going to turn the light out as she left the kitchen, but then she thought: What difference does it make?

  None.

  They got their coats out of the closet.

  When they left the apartment, Bob tried to lock the front door but he wasn’t able to do it right the first time he tried, so he had to lock the door a second time before he actually got it locked.

  All of the lights in the apartment were on.

  And Constance didn’t care.

  Finally something to replace bowling

  The Logan brothers held up their first filling station in New Mexico. They had left Kansas three weeks before. The only reason they were in New Mexico was because of the bowling trophies. They had gone to New Mexico for the same reason they had gone to Kansas because they had to go someplace and one place was just as good as another if you’re looking for stolen bowling trophies in America and you haven’t the slightest idea where they’re at.

  The station was just outside of Albuquerque.

  They needed some money and they were tired of stealing little things. It took too much time. It took as much energy to steal six little things as it took to steal one medium thing: like holding up a filling station, which would also give them the opportunity to get a tank of gas in the bargain.

  So one day in Albuquerque the Logans talked it over and decided to go into the business of holding up filling stations. And the fact that they could get free gas by doing this weighed heavily in their decision.

  While they were talking it over, one of the brothers said, “I’m tired of stealing rugs.”

  The other brothers agreed.

  “I’m also very tired of stealing newspaper racks.”

  The other brothers told him that they would never do anything like that again.

  The filling station was on the edge of Albuquerque. It only had one attendant. He was an old man who was tired of pumping gas. It was toward the end of his shift and he looked forward to going home and drinking some beer and watching television.

  He’d had it for that day.

  Pooped.

  The Logan brothers drove into the station and told the attendant to fill it up.

  “Regular or ethyl?”

  “Ethyl,” one of the brothers said.

  Normally, they ordered regular. It was going to be ethyl from now on out for the Logan brothers,

  “Check the oil, too,” one of them said.

  The attendant checked the oil while the tank was being filled with gas. He took a careful look at the dip stick. He had to because he needed glasses but he wouldn’t get them because he was too vain. He’d been quite a ladies’ man in his youth but you couldn’t tell it by looking at him now. He just looked like any other old man you’d see on the street.

  “It’s down two quarts,” he said.

  “Put some in,” a Logan brother said. “30 weight. Your best.”

  “OK,” the old man said, and tiredly went and got the oil.

  After the car was filled with gas and oil, the old man informed the Logan brothers that the cost for these items would be $11.75.

  “Cash or credit?” he said.

  “Neither,” one of them said, getting out of the car.

  The Logan brother did not have a gun but he had something bulging in his coat pocket that simulated one.

  “This is a stickup.” He liked it when he said that. It sounded exactly like something a gangster would say in a movie. Maybe that’s where he’d heard it and he was just repeating it but he didn’t care because it made him feel good saying it.

  “Just don’t hurt me,” the old man said, staring at the gun-like bulging thing that was pointing at him from the pocket of the standing Logan. He didn’t know that it was a rolled-up comic book.

  “We won’t hurt you if you pay attention. All we want is your money. If you don’t want to pay attention and give us your life, too, that’s your business.”

  The Logan brother was really enjoying saying these things. Why hadn’t they done this in the first place instead of stealing cans of tuna fish from the grocery stores?

  This was the way to do it!

  The old man gave them the money. It was a hundred and seventy-two dollars and thirty-five cents. The Logan brothers hadn’t seen that much money in months.

  “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “Have we hurt you yet?”

  “No.”

  “Did you pay attention?”

  “I think so. Yes. Yes, I did. I gave you the money.”

  “Come on,” one of the Logan brothers said fr
om the car. “Let’s get out of here.” He was getting tired of listening to his brother pretend to be a gangster.

  “You lived up to your part of the bargain and we’ll live up to ours. We’re that kind of men.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” came the voice of a Logan from the car. He was starting to get a little sick at his stomach. He couldn’t believe that his brother was going through this routine.

  “All right,” his brother said, getting back into the car. “We always keep our word!” he shouted at the trembling-old-man-filling-station attendant.

  It was two hours and halfway to Gallup, New Mexico, before his brothers would talk to him.

  “What did I do? Tell me. Come on. What’s wrong?”

  But they wouldn’t answer him, even though he kept pestering them. Finally, one of them said something. He said, “You’re an idiot! That’s what.”

  After his brother said that to him, he didn’t say anything for a while. He just stared sullenly out the window, thinking about why one of them didn’t get out of the car with a comic book rolled up in his pocket and hold up the old man if they were such hot shit.

  The Five-Gallon Gang

  The next Logan brothers’ filling station holdup was a lot easier. They didn’t use a comic book for a gun this time. They took some of the money from the first filling station holdup and bought a .22 revolver but they didn’t get any bullets for the gun. It was not until their 4th filling station holdup that they got some bullets for the gun and it wasn’t until their 32nd filling station holdup that they used the gun to shoot an attendant in the leg and it wasn’t until their 67th filling station holdup that they shot an attendant right between the eyes, bringing an abrupt and eternal halt to his pumping gas.