Willard and His Bowling Trophies (5 page)

They had hung up.

The note never came and the Logan brothers never heard from the person again.

Once they got a breather who sounded as if he were in the last stages of TB, a real death rattle.

hhhhhhhhhhh
(Cough

“Who is this?”

Middle Fork, Colorado

A month after the bowling trophies had been stolen, the Logan brothers came to the conclusion that the bowling trophies had been taken some place else and they hadn’t the slightest idea where, but it would be up to them to find out.

America was a very large place and the bowling trophies were very small in comparison.

The Logan brothers knew that they just couldn’t sit around town, waiting for something to happen because it might not happen and they would never find the bowling trophies.

The trophies would be gone forever.

The Logan brothers started making plans to leave town. The Logan brothers had no idea where they were going but they had to go someplace if they were ever going to find the trophies.

The day before they were going to leave, not knowing where they were going to go but anyplace would be a beginning, somebody called up on the telephone and told them that they thought the bowling trophies were in Middle Fork, Colorado.

The Logan brother who answered the telephone said thank you.

The brothers got a map and looked up Middle Fork, Colorado. The town was over a thousand miles away in the Rockies. They stared silently at the map for a long time.

Finally, one of the brothers spoke. “It’s a beginning,” he said.

Logan farewell

The next morning they said good-bye to their mother and she cried a lot at the parting. They would have liked to have said good-bye to their sisters but they couldn’t do that because their sisters were at that place again where they had been seven times before. By now, they must have set some kind of world record. The place was a hundred miles away in the opposite direction of where the bowling trophies might be, so . . . They would see their sisters at another time. Perhaps by then they would have recovered the bowling trophies and it would be a pleasant occasion and things would be like they used to be with the trophies in their cabinet again.

The Logan brothers had quit their jobs the day after the trophies had been stolen, so they could devote all their time to looking for them, a path that had led them only to frustration until they got the telephone call telling them that the trophies were in Middle Fork, Colorado.

The Logan brothers put three suitcases in the trunk of their car that had formerly transported many a just-won bowling trophy from the alleys to the cabinet. The car had once been full of happy Logan brothers. The Logan brothers that got into the car now were not the same boys they had been before.

They were all sitting in the front seat of the car because the back seat was filled with cakes, cookies and pies. The car drove slowly away. Their mother waved tearfully at them from the front porch of the only home they had ever known.

Their future was America and three long years of searching and a process of gradual character disintegration and a slow retreat from respectability and self-pride. In three years they would become what they had always despised.

They drove over to the garage where their father worked on transmissions. They didn’t get out of the car because they were very anxious to get going.

Their father stood beside the car with a wrench in his hand. He didn’t know what to say to them. He had a lot of trouble talking to people. Sometimes he wished that people were transmissions. Then he would be able to get along with them better. His sons looked very grim, sitting there. They had forgotten to shave that morning. They had always been very clean in their appearance and shaved every day before the bowling trophies had been stolen.

Since then their appearance had started downhill and would continue to travel in that direction until they ended up looking very seedy and disrespectable, the kind of men that made honest people very nervous when they saw them.

“I guess you boys are going after the bowling trophies,” their father said.

The brothers nodded.

“Well, good luck,” their father said and walked back into the garage to a waiting transmission.

The Logan brothers drove off.

Greta Garbo and Willard

Three years later in San Francisco, Patricia said to John after they had just come back from a movie, “Do you think Greta Garbo would like Willard?”

They were sitting on the couch, drinking glasses of cold white wine in the room where Willard reigned with his bowling trophies. Sometimes the expression on Willard’s face was different. He looked slightly apprehensive now as if something were going to happen that he did not like.

The ability of Willard’s face to change had something to do with the way the artist had created Willard after waking from his dream.

Willard was a kind of bird
Mona Lisa
.

“Maybe,” John said. “You can’t tell. Willard is an acquired taste.”

“I think Greta Garbo would like Willard,” Pat said.

Pat and John did not notice the look of apprehension on Willard’s face. They were enjoying their wine and thinking about other things, so to them Willard was just good old Willard and his bowling trophies.

“How old is Greta Garbo?” John asked.

“I think she’s sixty-eight,” Pat said. “I may be wrong. She may be a little older or a little younger but she’s somewhere in her sixties.”

“How old is Willard?” John said.

“I don’t know. Three or four years,” Pat said.

“Don’t you think Greta Garbo is a little old for Willard?” John said.

“No, I think they’d be good friends.”

“Greta Garbo is a loner,” John said. “Remember that. And Willard is very fond of his bowling trophies.”

“That cannot be denied,” Pat said.

The game is over

“John and Pat are back from the movie,” Constance said. She had finished her sandwich and was now getting dressed. Bob had stopped reading from the
Greek Anthology
and was sitting on the bed, watching her. He liked to watch her get dressed. He hadn’t started to put any clothes on yet.

“How do you know?” he said.

“I can hear them moving around downstairs,” Constance said.

Patricia and John always made a lot of noise when they first entered their apartment and the noise travelled up through the floor. The noise was very easy to hear. Bob just wasn’t listening any more. Before he got the warts in his penis he used to complain about it all the time, “They’re nice people but why are they so God-damn noisy!” Now he didn’t say anything about it.

“They went to see a Greta Garbo movie,” Constance said, slipping a dress over her head. “They’re big Greta Garbo fans.”

“What?” Bob said.

“That was a good sandwich,” Constance said.

“You look very pretty,” Bob said.

She did, too.

‘Thank you,” Constance said and tossed her head, causing her long blonde hair to fall across her shoulder. She walked over to the dresser and got a brush and started to brush her hair in the mirror.

The dress had short sleeves. The rope marks were visible on her wrists. They were red and slightly weltish. They looked very incongruous.

Bob put his clothes on.

Then he picked up the ropes that were lying on the bed. He took the ropes and put them in a hall closet on a shelf. Actually, he was hiding them under a blanket that was on the shelf. He was ashamed of them but he could not stop himself from using them on her. He wished that things could be different but they weren’t. They just stayed the same after the warts.

Maybe they would change next week.

He certainly hoped so.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, he had been hoping so.

He had forgotten the gag and went back into the bedroom to get it. Constance had finished brushing her hair. She turned to say something to Bob when he came back into the room but when she saw that he had returned to get the gag, she went back to brushing her hair in the mirror without saying what she was going to say.

He took the gag into the bathroom. He didn’t like the way it felt in his hand. It was soaking wet with her spit. His ears started burning with embarrassment He would be very glad when the gag wasn’t in his hand any more. When he had taken the gag out of her mouth, it had been a warm wet but now it was a cold wet. That didn’t make him feel very good either.

Bob put the gag in the dirty-clothes basket in the bathroom. Actually, he was hiding it among the dirty clothes, feeling shame again.

Then he washed his hands very carefully with soap as if he had fouled them with some kind of strange excrement. He washed his hands for a long time.

Constance left the bedroom and walked down the hall past the open door of the bathroom where he was standing there washing totally clean hands over and over again. He was so absorbed in washing his hands that he didn’t notice her when she walked by.

She went into the kitchen and got a glass of water.

Bob dried his hands.

He went back to the bedroom to see Constance.

She wasn’t there.

“Where are you?” he yelled down the hall.

“I’m here in the kitchen.”

Salve

Finally the Logan brother couldn’t take it anymore. “I think I’ll go out and get another beer,” he said. “This waiting makes one thirsty. I’ll be back in just a minute. There’s a store open right on the corner.” He started to stand up. He thought that he could fake his way out.

“No,” said the Logan brother who had just a few seconds before been practicing how to answer the telephone when it rang and a strange voice told them where the bowling trophies were. He already knew what his first words would be after the person told him where the bowling trophies were. “If you’re lying, you’re dead,” would be the words.

“Why not?” the beer-drinker Logan brother said. He said why not like a child would say it after he had been refused an ice-cream cone or something. There was a slight whine to the beer-drinker’s voice. It sounded strange coming from him because he looked very mean . . . like a real outlaw.

“Because I say so,” was his brother’s reply. He was the older brother and was not given to explaining things after he had made a decision. Things were a closed matter when he said they were.

The beer-drinker started to say something that would have been a plea for beer but he knew that it would be useless, so he didn’t say it. “I wish that fucking telephone would ring,” was what he said instead and there was no child-like whine to it. This time his voice sounded the way he looked.

The comic-book-reading Logan didn’t even bother to look up from the salve ad while this exchange went on. He wondered why he had never sold salve when he was a kid. It looked like a real interesting way to make money.

The cows

Three years ago the bowling trophies were not in Colorado.

It had been a long drive for them across hundreds of miles of flatlands and then way up into the mountains until finally they arrived at a small town that had a population of 123 people. They went to the address that had been given to them over the telephone, but there was no street or house there, just a long field at the edge of town with some cows grazing on it.

The cows stopped eating to look at the Logan brothers.

The downstairs apartment

After talking about a possible friendship between Greta Garbo and Willard for a while and drinking a glass of wine, Patricia and John decided that it was time to go to bed, even though it was a little early. It was twenty after ten. They usually went to bed around midnight. John liked to watch a little bit of the Johnny Carson show on television. He said that it helped him sleep. It didn’t make any difference at all to Patricia because she was sound asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Patricia and John did not know that they were at odds when they decided to go to bed early.

He was tired and wanted to sleep.

She was not tired and wanted to make love.

They said good night to Willard and left the front room.

“Don’t forget the bowling trophies,” Pat said.

“Good night, bowling trophies,” John said,
clicking
the light off and leaving Willard with his beloved bowling trophies, which was the way it was always meant to be.

It was not until they had taken off their clothes and gotten into bed that Patricia and John’s differences in romantic attitudes were discovered.

Patricia cuddled around John and began touching him in ways that were different from a good-night kiss. John was very, very tired.

He tried to ignore her, hoping that she would get the message. She did not get the message. He rolled over to the other side of the bed. She followed him.

“I’m too tired,” he said, finally.

“You can pretend I’m Greta Garbo,” Pat said. “Would you like that? Pretend I’m Greta Garbo. Come on. I’m Greta Garbo and I want you,” Pat whispered moistly into his ear.

“I’m still too tired,” John said. “And that’s nothing against Greta Garbo or you.”

“Are you sure?” she said, touching his penis intriguingly with her hand.

“I’m sure,” he said, brushing her hand away as if it were a mosquito.

Patricia gave up. She rolled over on her back and stared up at the darkened ceiling. “I wish Willard had a penis,” she said.

“You’re not his type,” John said.

“What do you mean by that?” Patricia said, turning over to face his back.

“You’re not a bowling trophy,” John said.

The sandwich

“Are you hungry?” Bob asked Constance.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, half-looking at a magazine.

“No,” she said. “I just had a sandwich.”

The super race

Patricia decided to try another time at seducing John. She would work on his sense of humor. Sometimes when he was in a funny mood, he would get horny. She didn’t know why this was but she was not above using it. Patricia was twenty-five years old and very interested in sex. John was also very interested in sex but he was tired this evening.

“How do you know that I’m not a bowling trophy? Sometimes you treat me just like one,” Patricia said in a very sexy voice which was breathing delicately on his back.