Willard and His Bowling Trophies (8 page)

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 from 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.

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 fin
ished 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.