Free Willard and His Bowling Trophies by Richard Brautigan Page B

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 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