Free Willard and His Bowling Trophies by Richard Brautigan

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