Willard and His Bowling Trophies (9 page)

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 brothers.

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 Carson 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.

“
This is it
,” one of them whispered, halfway up the stairs toward the first apartment.

“
Shut up
,” another Logan whispered.

The dice thrown

Bob sat down on the bed and started reading the
Greek Anthology
to Constance.

“It’s late,” she said, trying gently to protest, but it didn’t make any difference because Bob didn’t hear her. He just kept on reading.

“ ‘A wattle basket full of the stalks of fine white celery,’ ” he read to her. Then he paused and said, “I wonder what a wattle basket is. What’s a wattle basket, honey?”

“It’s a basket woven out of twigs and sticks,” Constance sighed. She slowly closed her eyes. She lay there on the bed with her eyes closed.

“Is this the apartment?”
the Logan with the gun whispered as they all stood there on the landing beside the first apartment. The landing was dark, so they couldn’t see any number on the door.

“
What’s the number?”

The comic-book-reading Logan who’d answered the telephone was thinking very hard as his brother struck a match to expose a copper number 2 on the front door to the flickering flame of the match.

“
It’s number 1
,” he suddenly remembered.

“But this number says 2,”
was the whispering from his brother.

“It’s number 1, I tell you. 1. It’s 1,”
whispering.

“Then the apartment upstairs must be number 1,”
whispering.

“Yeah, it has to be. If this is number 2, then number 1 must be upstairs,”
whispering.

“What’s number 2 doing down here? Shouldn’t number 1 be down here and number 2 up there?”
whispering.

“All I know is that it’s number 1. That’s where the bowling trophies are. Let’s go up there and get them,”
whispering.

“OK, but it seems funny to me,”
whispering.

One of the Logan brothers was not whispering. All he wanted was a can of beer.

On a slightly drunken evening a few months ago,
Patricia and John decided to play a little joke on Constance and Bob by switching the numbers on the apartments while they were out.

They thought that it would be very funny for the first apartment in the building to be number 2 and the second apartment to be number 1.

Constance did not think it was funny when she saw it. Bob was puzzled. “I thought we lived in apartment 2,” he said, staring at the number 1 on the door to their apartment “It’s all right,” Constance said.

“But it seems strange to me,” Bob said.

“Don’t think about it,” Constance said, not liking it but somehow they never got around to changing the numbers back. One thing or another kept them away from it.

The Logan brothers moved stealthily up the next flight of stairs to Constance and Bob’s apartment.

“See, here’s number 1,”
the comic-book-reading Logan whispered triumphantly.

“Number 1,”
his brother whispered, taking the pistol out of his pocket. He wasn’t saying it to anybody. He was just saying it to himself. It had been three years long enough to be lifetimes and perhaps they were.
“Number 1,”
again whispered.