Willard and His Bowling Trophies

Willard and his Bowling Trophies

Richard Brautigan was born in the Pacific North-West in 1935, and now lives in San Francisco. His novels,
Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, A Confederate General from Big Sur, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Sombrero Fallout, Dreaming of Babylon,
and
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western,
have all been published in Picador, as has his collection of short stories,
Revenge of the Lawn.

Also by

Richard Brautigan in Picador

Trout Fishing in America

In Watermelon Sugar

A Confederate General from Big Sur

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

Revenge of the Lawn

Sombrero Fallout

Dreaming of Babylon

Richard Brautigan

Willard and His

Bowling Trophies

A Perverse Mystery

published by Pan Books

First published in Great Britain 1976 by Jonathan Cape Ltd

This edition published 1977 by Pan Books Ltd,

Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG

© Richard Brautigan 1976

ISBN 0 330 26250 X

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it

shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,

hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior

consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

'The dice of Love are madnesses and melees'

Anacreon

The
Greek Anthology

'This land is cursed with violence'

Senator Frank Church

Democrat, Idaho

The
Greek Anthology

Constance turned herself awkwardly on the bed to watch him leave the room.

“I’ve been thinking about this all day long,” Bob said. “I want you—” Then he was gone with his voice trailing away, “to hear it,” down the hall to another room.

She lay there awkwardly waiting for him to return. She thought that he was only going to be gone for a moment but he was gone for almost ten minutes.

The air in the bedroom was warm and still. It was an unusually warm September evening in San Fran cisco but the window was closed and the shades were down.

They had to be.

He can’t find the book
, she thought

He was always losing things. For many long months now he’d had a lot of trouble doing anything right. It made her sad because she loved him.

She sighed, which became a slight muffled sound because of the handkerchief that was loosely stuffed in her mouth. She could have easily pushed the handkerchief out of her mouth with her tongue if she had wanted to.

Bob couldn’t do anything right now.

He couldn’t even gag her well.

But of course he had tied her hands too tight and her feet too loose and she sighed again, making a muffled sound as she waited for him to find the book that he’d lost which was usual for everything he did now.

He hadn’t always been this way and she felt guilty about it because she thought that it was partly her fault for giving him the warts and after he got the warts, all of this stuff started happening.

The light hanging down from the ceiling should have been a hundred-watt bulb, but instead it was a two hundred-watt bulb. It was his doing. She didn’t like that much light. He did.

Finally he came back into the room with the book and she pushed the gag out of her mouth and said, “My hands are too tight.”

“Oh,” he said, looking down at her from the book in his hand which was turned to a particular page that he was just about to read aloud.

He put the book down on the bed, still opened to the page that he wanted to read from. He sat down beside her and she rolled awkwardly over onto her stomach, so that he could get at the knot in the rope. She didn’t have any clothes on and she had a nice body.

He retied her hands so that they weren’t as tight, but they were still tight enough so that she couldn’t get them loose.

“Retie my feet,” she said. “They’re too loose.”

If he’s going to be an amateur sadist
, she thought,
I
might as well see if I can get him to do it right.

She was very disappointed in him. She was a perfectionist in everything that she did and was very annoyed with his newly found incompetence.

For months now, ever since he had gone on his amateur sadist trip, she had been thinking:
Anybody can tie up somebody and gag them, why can’t he?

Why can’t he do anything right and he overwaters
the plants and things drop out of his hands and he’s always falling over things and breaking things and he forgets what he’s talking about half the time in the middle of what he’s saying but I guess it really doesn’t make that much difference because he doesn’t talk about anything interesting, anyway, and it’s been going on for months, ever since she gave him the warts, but hadn’t she suffered with them, too, going to the doctor all those times and having the warts burned off in her vagina with an electric needle and then coming home on the bus, holding back the tears in a lonely moving place filled with silent strangers? . . . oh, God . . . oh, well . . . we could be dead. Maybe this is better than being dead, I guess. I don’t know.

After he finished tying her feet again, he started to pick up the book that he had been about to read from. Then he noticed that the gag was out of her mouth. He put the book back down and leaned over toward her. She knew what he wanted and what he was going to do.

She opened her mouth as wide as she could.

He suddenly got nervous. Sometimes when he gagged her he pushed part of the gag against her lower lip with his thumb and he would hurt her mouth as it was going in and she would really get mad at him and curse him, “BASTARD!” Then the gag would be in her mouth and her curses would be muffled, inarticulate, but he knew what she was saying and it always made him feel bad and sometimes he would blush and his ears would tingle with embarrassment.

She would glower up at him from beautiful green eyes. He would turn away from them and wait for her to calm down.

He didn’t like being an incompetent but there was nothing that he could do about it. It had been going on for months and it didn’t make him feel very good either.

He could tell by how wide she had just opened her mouth that he had better control his nervousness and not hurt her when he put the gag back in her mouth.

Her mouth was delicate, her tongue sculptured and pink. The gag was already very wet from her spit. He put it carefully back into her mouth, making sure that he did not hurt her with his thumb. He took his index finger and worked the gag back into all the crevices of her mouth.

She lay there on her stomach with her hands tied behind her back, resting just above her ass. Her head was arched back now, so she would be in a better position for him to gag her.

They had done this many times.

The room was illuminated by a light that was too bright.

She had long blonde hair.

There was just a small piece of the gag sticking out between her teeth. He very carefully tucked that piece into her mouth. Then he gave the gag a good push with his finger straight back into her mouth, so as to make her tongue totally immobile, useless to push the gag out with.

He was very nervous and he tried to control it because he didn’t want to hurt her but he also wanted the gag to be firmly in her mouth.

She moaned behind the gag when he started pushing it back into place with his finger. She moved her head suddenly side to side as if to escape the finger that was pushing the gag against her tongue.

He continued pushing for a few more seconds and then he knew it was in place and she would not be able to work it out with her tongue.

About once in every ten times he would gag her effectively. He just didn’t have it together any more. He knew that his failures annoyed her, but what else could he do?

His whole life was a sloppy and painful mess.

He had used adhesive tape for a while. The tape always gagged her effectively but she didn’t like the way it hurt when he pulled it off. Even if he pulled it off very gently, it still hurt like hell, so the tape had to go.

“No,” she had said about the tape and he knew that it was no. She had never said no before, so he stopped using the tape.

He took his finger out of her mouth and stroked the side of her face. She relaxed her head. He stroked her hair. She stared silently up at him. She really had very beautiful eyes. Everybody always mentioned that to her. She awkwardly crawled and inched her body over to him. It was difficult but she got her head up onto his lap and she was staring up at him. Her hair poured over his lap like blonde water.

She really loved him.

That’s what made it all so bad.

“Can you breathe all right?” he said.

She nodded her head gently that she could breathe all right.

“Does the gag hurt?”

She shook her head gently that the gag did not hurt.

“Do you want to hear what I read today?”

She nodded her head gently that she wanted to hear what he had read today.

He picked up the book.

It was a very old book.

He read to her: “ ‘O Poverty, thou grievous and resistless ill, who with thy sister Helplessness overwhelmest a great people . . .’ ”

She stared up at him,

“That’s Alcaeus from the
Greek Anthology
,” he said. “That was written over two thousand years ago.”

. . . oh, God
, she thought and tried very hard not to cry because she knew if she started crying that would make him feel even worse and he had been feeling pretty bad for a long time.

The
Story of O

Constance and Bob’s fourth-rate theater of sadism and despair started off rather simply. She was the first one to get the warts. They were venereal warts inside of her vagina.

She’d had a drunken one-night-stand love affair with a middle-aged lawyer who had read her book. She was a twenty-three-year-old-just-failed novelist and he had told her that he liked her book and she was feeling very badly because the book, though it was a critical success, was not selling, and she had been forced to go back to work.

So she went to bed with the lawyer and got warts in her vagina.

They looked like a hideous clump of nightmare mushrooms. They had to be burned off with an electric needle: one painful treatment following on the claws of another painful treatment.

When she found out that she had the warts, she talked to Bob about ending their marriage. She felt so embarrassed. She thought that there was no reason to continue her life.

“Please . . . ,” she said. “I can’t go on living with you. I’ve done such a terrible thing.”

“No way,” Bob told her and was so good to her, knowing all about the affair, and he took care of everything in a super-effective way which was how he handled things . . . then.

They could not have a normal sex life for two months because that’s how long it took for the warts to be burned out of her vagina and sometimes when she came home from seeing the doctor and his electric needle, she would just sit down and start crying.

Bob comforted her and took care of her and made her feel better, caressing her hair, holding her, talking gently to her, “You’re my woman. I love you. It will be all over soon,” until she stopped crying.

Because they were denied access to a traditional sex life, venereal warts are caused by a communicable virus that’s transmitted through intercourse, they had to do other things, which they did.

They really liked having intercourse together. Bob loved the way his penis fit inside of Constance’s vagina, and she did, too. They used to make jokes about erotic plumbing. They were both kind of traditional sex fiends.