Willard and His Bowling Trophies

by Richard Brautigan

  The second filling station holdup was done in a lot less dramatic fashion than the first one. It did not employ any late-show 1930’s gangster histrionics in its execution.

  It started off like this:

  very low keyed,

  “This is a holdup,”

  etc.

  The Logan brothers just simply held up the filling station. They were becoming polished professional filling station holdup men in a very short time. You might even say that they were precocious about holding up filling stations and soon they were able to do it with the same efficiency that they had previously dedicated to bowling.

  During the 5th filling station holdup they started using an MO that the police identified them with and the newspapers built up an image.

  The Logan brothers did their usual thing of having the tank filled and the oil checked before they announced their intentions to the attendant but then while the robbery was being executed, one of the brothers took a five-gallon can from the trunk and filled it up with gas.

  One evening just before this particular robbery, they decided that they needed every drop of gasoline that they could get their hands on to find the stolen bowling trophies and why not an extra can of gas as part of the robberies.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” one of the Logan brothers said.

  The other two agreed.

  And the newspapers referred to them after that as the “Five-Gallon Gang.”

  FIVE-GALLON GANG STRIKES IN FLAGSTAFF

  LAST SEEN DRIVING TOWARD PRESCOTT

  BUT VANISH INTO THIN AIR

  POLICE CAN’T FIND THEM

  No, these were not the simple honest Logan brothers who’d left home less than a year ago in search of their stolen bowling trophies.

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “Do you want to go back to stealing rugs out of backyards and stepping all over people’s flowers?”

  “No, but I don’t think you should have killed him. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just getting the money like all the rest of the guys except for that guy we had to shoot in the leg. He was bothersome, so we had to shoot him. He was a son-of-a-bitch and I’d shoot him again if I had the chance, but I wouldn’t kill him.”

  “Then you do want to go back to stealing rugs?”

  “No!”

  The Logan brother who wasn’t in the conversation was drinking a can of beer. They tried to get him into the conversation.

  “What do you think?”

  He didn’t answer. He just waved his can of beer in such a way as to show that he wasn’t interested. He had no interest. All he wanted to do was enjoy cold beer trickling down his throat.

  Johnny Carson

  Patricia finished her turkey sandwich before John finished his. She wasn’t a fast eater either. It was just that he was a very slow eater.

  Constance was holding Bob’s hand as they took a short walk to Fillmore Street. They didn’t say anything as they walked along. The evening was still warm. They walked very slowly. When they reached Fillmore, they turned around and started walking back. They still hadn’t said anything.

  Patricia was asleep before John finished his sandwich. He continued eating his sandwich very, very slowly and watching Johnny Carson tell jokes. He tried not to laugh too hard at Johnny Carson’s jokes because he didn’t want to spit a mouthful of turkey sandwich all over the bed.

  The next guest on the Johnny Carson show was a young actress who was wearing a dress with a very low neckline. She had giant breasts and tried to walk demurely over from the curtain to where Johnny Carson was sitting with his other guests. Johnny Carson made a joke about her breasts as she walked toward him. The audience laughed heartily. The actress tried to smile. And John spit a big mouthful of turkey sandwich all over the bed.

  The actress sat down.

  John checked to see if he had awakened Patricia when he laughingly spit the sandwich on the bed. No, he hadn’t awakened her. Good. He didn’t want her to see the pieces of turkey sandwich on the bed. That would have embarrassed him. He quickly cleaned them up.

  The actress told Johnny Carson and millions of insomniac Americans, many of them surrounded by fragments of food that they had just laughed out of their mouths, that she had just finished making a Western in Italy.

  That’s all she said.

  But Johnny Carson was able to use it to make another joke about her breasts. The audience laughed heartily again. John was glad that he didn’t have any more food in his mouth.

  Beards

  The Logan who had gone berserk a little while before, and then after he’d come to his senses was able to convince his brothers that they should kill the people who had stolen the bowling trophies, had gotten the .22 pistol out of their only suitcase.

  They’d had three suitcases when they started out looking for the bowling trophies but the Logans after a little while stopped paying any attention to their wardrobe anymore and wore the same clothes all the time now. They didn’t need three suitcases, so they carried their lives around in one battered suitcase.

  It had been years since they’d brushed their teeth.

  And they were very remiss in shaving but somehow they managed to shave just short of having beards on their faces. They had considered wearing beards at one time, but they figured that it would make it too easy for the police to identify them. They didn’t want that to happen because they knew that there was no way they were going to be able to find the bowling trophies if they were in prison.

  One of the Logan brothers summed it up when he said, “No beards.”

  Cookies and cakes and pies (tons of

  Though her beloved sons had been gone for three years without a word from them, Mother Logan continued baking just as many cakes and pies and cookies as she did when they were living there in the house.

  Sometimes it was hard to find your way around the kitchen because it was so filled with baked stuff. Once Mr Logan put a cup of coffee down in the kitchen and he couldn’t find it among all that baking.

  Mr Logan had thought about asking his wife not to bake so much but he never got around to asking her. It was easier for him to live with all those cakes and pies and cookies than it was for him to say anything to anybody about anything.

  If his wife were a transmission there would be a lot less cookies and pies and cakes in the house.

  He never did find that cup of coffee.

  A vision of ringing

  The older Logan brother took the pistol out of the suitcase. He opened the cylinder to make sure the gun was loaded. It was. The six little bullets rested in their six little homes. They were hollow points. They would tear a nice hole in you and provide you with enough death to last forever.

  He flipped the cylinder back into the gun and then a few seconds later he opened the cylinder and looked at the bullets again. If more than six people had stolen the trophies, he’d beat the extra ones to death with the butt of the pistol.

  He would prefer that there were six or less bowling trophy thieves because it was easier to shoot people than it was to beat them to death, but he wouldn’t think twice about beating them to death if there happened to be more than six bowling trophy thieves.

  “It’s going to ring,” the comic-book-reading Logan brother said, suddenly looking up from the salve ad to the telephone.

  The beer drinker turned his head toward him.

  The Logan brother with the gun in his hand looked over toward him.

  The Logan brother who’d just said, “It’s going to ring,” started slowly to reach for the telephone, even though it was not ringing. It was just an ordinary silent black telephone, but he was reaching for it, anyway.

  His two brothers watched him.

  They wondered what he was doing.

  The Logans unemployed

  Three years Is a long time to wander around America, looking for stolen bowling trophies. It can change a person. Sometimes for the worst, as was the case with the Logan brot
hers.

  After they did not find the bowling trophies in New Mexico, though they had found a new occupation, they tried Arizona without a favorable conclusion to their searching.

  Then they went to Connecticut and spent a month there: no bowling trophies. After that they went to Oklahoma and spent six months there and it was the same: no bowling trophies. They had by this time held up over a hundred filling stations.

  They went to Louisiana, no luck there, and Indiana, same story, but in Alabama they got a tip that the bowling trophies were in Alaska.

  They spent five freezing months in and around Pt Barrow, Alaska, looking for the bowling trophies in igloos but that didn’t come to anything.

  And it was very hard to find filling stations to hold up in that area, so the Logan brothers had to temporarily give up their occupation and were then reduced to stealing blubber to eat from unattended igloos.

  Finally, they met an old Eskimo who told them that he had heard about some statues of silver and gold little men who were pitching little balls with their hands and seemed happy doing so.

  “Those sound like bowling trophies,” one of the Logan brothers said to another Logan brother, who was standing there freezing in a snowstorm. The third brother did not want a beer.

  “Do you know what a bowling trophy is?” a Logan asked the old Eskimo.

  “You mean, prize given for thunderball that runs on wood?”

  “Yes! That’s a bowling trophy!” the Logan exclaimed.

  “Try San Francisco,” the Eskimo said, pointing the way south through the falling snow.

  Beautiful American night

  The actress with the big breasts was very uncomfortable all the time that she was being “interviewed” by Johnny Carson because he kept making leering remarks but the audience enjoyed them and so did John. Normally, he had turned Johnny Carson off by this time of the night but he had no intention of turning Johnny off as long as he was making all these funny remarks about this girl’s tits.

  Johnny Carson was somehow, it seemed almost miraculous to John, able to work in a sentence about a cow in another context. He didn’t suggest in any way that the girl was a cow but when he said the word cow, everybody looked at her tits and laughed heartily.

  John tried not to wake up Patricia with his laughter.

  Bob stumbled over a curb as they, he and Constance, went to cross the street. He was thrown off balance but Constance caught his elbow, so he didn’t fall.

  “I almost fell,” he said.

  Constance thought he was going to say something else but he didn’t, so they continued walking in silence back to their apartment.

  The Greek Anthology telephone call

  The telephone rang just as the Logan brother’s hand touched the receiver and he picked it up without any hesitation in one motion as if the telephone had been ringing all the time.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “. . .”

  I’m one of them,” he said.

  “. . .”

  “The very same,” he said.

  “. . .”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “. . .”

  “On Chestnut,” he said.

  “. . .”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “. . .”

  “I appreciate it,” he said.

  “. . .”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “. . .”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “. . .”

  “Anytime,” he said.

  The Logan brother hung up.

  Lost

  Bob fumbled open the front door of the apartment building with his key and they went upstairs to their apartment on the top floor. The light was out on the stairs. It had burned out the day before and hadn’t been replaced yet. Either Patricia or Constance would take care of it. Somehow they always ended up replacing the light in the hall.

  Bob fumbled open the door to their apartment and they went in and took off their coats. The apartment was ablaze with lights.

  “Who left the lights on?” Bob said.

  Constance didn’t answer him.

  She went into the kitchen and got a glass of water. She was still thirsty from having been gagged so long earlier in the evening.

  Bob wandered aimlessly around the apartment, not even knowing that he was doing it.

  “Are you sleepy?” Constance asked Bob as he wandered past her on one of his directionless journeys.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Then let’s go to bed,” Constance said.

  “I’d like to read a little from the Greek Anthology,” Bob said. “Before I go to sleep.”

  He started to look around the apartment for the book. He looked in the kitchen. He couldn’t find it there. He looked in the bedroom but it wasn’t there either, so it had to be in the front room. He went into the front room expecting to find the book there.

  Constance brushed her teeth and then went into the bedroom and started getting undressed for bed. She was very tired. She was too young to be as tired as she felt.

  “Constance?” Bob called to her from the front room.

  “What is it, Bob?”

  “Have you seen the Greek Anthology? It has to be in the front room but I can’t find it.”

  The Greek Anthology was on a small table next to the bed. Constance was staring at it.

  “No,” she said.

  “It has to be some place,” Bob said. “It just couldn’t have disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  Constance finished taking her clothes off. She could hear Bob looking for the Greek Anthology in the kitchen. She didn’t care. She got into bed. She always slept without any clothes on.

  He gave up in the kitchen and came into the bed room. Constance was lying in bed with the covers pulled close up around her neck.

  “Hey, there it is,” Bob said happily, spotting the Greek Anthology on the table beside the bed. “I knew it had to be some place.”

  Near the end of the trail

  The Logan brothers packed their suitcase. That took about ten seconds and they checked out of the hotel. The one Logan brother had the .22 pistol in his pocket

  Their car which looked a lot older and battered than it did when they left home three years ago was parked across the street from the hotel.

  One of the brothers put the suitcase in the trunk next to a full five-gallon can of gasoline. His brothers were already in the front seat of the car when he got in beside them.

  “What’s the address?” they asked him.

  “It’s on Chestnut Street.”

  “Did he tell you how to get there?”

  They had already had this conversation before in the hotel room after the one brother had hung up the telephone. They were just repeating it again because it made them happy. Soon they would have their bowling trophies back.

  “Yeah, turn left here at Pine Street, then go down it for a ways and I’ll show you where to turn. We turn at Fillmore.”

  They drove slowly down Pine Street toward the recovery of their stolen bowling trophies. They didn’t say anything to each other. Two of the brothers were lost in thoughts of seeing their beloved bowling trophies again. The other brother was thinking about murder.

  Five minutes to one

  “One more minute,” John told himself. “I’m going to watch Johnny Carson just one more minute.”

  There were only a few moments left of the program which, ended at 1 a.m. John always liked to turn Johnny Carson off before the program was over. Whenever he watched the entire program he always felt a little bad. He liked to be in control of his television watching and not a prisoner of it, so he always felt a little bad if he watched the entire Johnny Carson show. Normally, he just watched twenty or thirty minutes of it and that was enough to get him sleepy, to kind of wind his mind down from the day’s activities.

  He turned the set off just a few seconds before Johnny Carso
n said good night to millions of Americans and John didn’t feel bad at all. He was the dictator of his television watching and had triumphed again.

  He turned the light out and cuddled close to the warm sleeping form of Patricia.

  “Good night,” he said, though she couldn’t hear him.

  Millions of people heard Johnny Carson say good night.

  Toward meeting the Logan brothers

  The Logan brothers parked their car across the street from the apartment where Patricia and John and Constance and Bob lived. It was a three-story building with a laundry on the bottom floor. Then there was Patricia and John’s apartment that occupied the entire second floor, and Constance and Bob’s apartment was the third floor. There was a locked front door on the street level and then a long flight of stairs that led up to the apartments above.

  The Logan brothers walked over to the building. They looked around. The street was very quiet because it was just a few moments after one in the morning. The street had had a lot of traffic earlier in the evening but the traffic had pretty much trailed away into only an occasional car after midnight.

  “This is the building,” a Logan said to nobody because his brothers already knew that this was the building. He tried the door. “It’s locked,” he said.

  One of them reached into his pocket and took out a short piece of stiff plastic, something left over from the days when they did minor crime things before they found their niche: filling station holdups.

  He slipped the piece of plastic into the door where the lock was and pushed the bolt back with the piece of plastic and opened the door in a quick motion.

  The Logan brothers were inside.

  They started carefully up the stairs. It was very dark. They didn’t want to make any more noise than was necessary.