Tears slowly started ebbing from his eyes and flowing down his cheeks. He had started crying. The tears became low slow sobbing while the fork remained half way to his mouth with a bite of spaghetti bread resting precariously upon it.
“What is it?” Constance said, reaching over and taking the fork from Bob’s hand and putting it down on the plate in front of him.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
He didn’t say anything.
He just sat there continuing to cry.
Constance reached over and took his hand in her hand. “What is it, baby? Tell me what it is.”
Bob just keep crying.
Constance didn’t try to find out any more from him why he was crying. She continued holding his hand but she left him alone in his sorrow.
The plate of spaghetti bread looked silly in front of a grown man crying. Constance didn’t like to sit there holding his hand as he cried with that plate of stuff in front of them. It hurt her dignity and put Bob in a bad light, too.
She gently let go of Bob’s hand and reached over and picked up the plate of spaghetti bread and got up and took it over to the sink.
Then she returned to Bob’s hand again.
He cried for ten minutes.
Constance didn’t say anything more.
She waited for Bob to stop crying.
Kansas
The Logan brothers spent that night in Middle Fork nosing around but they couldn’t find any clues to why the house that the bowling trophies were supposed to be in wasn’t there.
Besides that, people looked at them as if they were a little crazy. “That’s a pasture out there,” an old-timer said to them, looking at them very carefully in the town bar. They waited for him to say something else about the pasture but that was it. The Logan brothers felt a little uncomfortable. They said thank you and tried to find somebody else who could help them.
The old man told the story many times about the three strangers asking if there was a house out there and he said, “ ‘No, that’s a pasture out there,’ and then you know what they said to me? They said thank you for me telling them what they had seen with their very own eyes.”
The old man always laughed when he finished telling the story about the three strangers who came into town looking for a house that was a pasture. “Yeah, they thanked me for telling them that,” and whomever he’d told the story to would laugh along with him.
“I just don’t know what the world’s coming to,” would be the final period at the end of the story.
The next day the Logan brothers left for Kansas. They had no reason to believe that the bowling trophies were in Kansas but they had to look some place and Kansas was just as good as any other place.
The Matthew Brady echo
Patricia and John were lying quietly beside each other in bed. They were very contented from their lovemaking. John had forgotten that he was tired and Patricia’s mind was drained of all passion like an empty swimming pool in the winter.
“Did you hear something in the other room?” Patricia said finally, after a long peaceful time.
“No,” John said. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“I thought I heard something,” Patricia said.
“Well, I didn’t hear anything,” John said. “What did you hear? What did it sound like?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
John reached over and touched Patricia’s hair. It felt beautiful in the dark.
“Maybe it was your imagination,” he said.
A change of plans
After the brief violent outburst from the oldest Logan brother, the little hotel room had been returned to normal and the Logan brothers had gone back to waiting again for the telephone to ring and a voice to tell them where the bowling trophies were.
The Logan brother who had lost his cool wasn’t sitting by the telephone any more. He had changed places on the bed with the comic-book-reading Logan who’d forgotten his comic book when they moved.
He was going to ask his brother to hand him the comic book but his brother was reading it now and he felt that it was better not to disturb him.
The comic-book-reading Logan had hurt his wrist in the wrestling match with his totally berserk brother and he thought that it was best just to let things be and for his brother to read the comic book in his stead.
The beer-drinker Logan still wanted a beer but he knew he wouldn’t get one until the evening’s activities were over and so . . . he felt sort of hopeless.
The telephone Logan who was now the comic book-reading Logan was absent-mindedly staring at the same salve ad that he had put his brother down for reading a little while ago, but he really didn’t see the ad. It was just color and motion in his hands. He was actually thinking about the bowling trophies and the people who had stolen them. He was thinking very hard and very grimly about them.
Then he looked up from the comic book to the telephone. The telephone was not ringing. It was just a strange black silent object on a table.
“Let’s kill them,” he said.
“What?” the brother by the telephone said.
“I said, let’s kill them.”
“Kill who?”
“You know who. The bastards who stole our bowling trophies. They don’t deserve to live. Look what they’ve done to us. They’ve made us into animals. We’re just animals now. Fucking animals.”
“You mean, you want to kill them?”
“That’s right.”
“What do you think?” the one by the telephone asked the Logan who didn’t have a beer in his hand but wanted one to be there and not having a beer in his hand suddenly made him very mad.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s kill them.”
If he’d had a beer, cold and comfortable, in his hand he would not have wanted to kill them. He would have said instead, “No, let’s just beat the shit out of them and get our trophies and go home.”
But because he didn’t have a can of beer in his hand, he said, “Sure, let’s kill them.”
Now two Logan brothers were staring at the Logan
brother who was sitting beside the telephone but would have preferred to be a child, selling salve to his neighbors and earning lots of money selling something that made people feel better when they used it and afterwards thought kindly of him for selling the salve to them.
“OK,” he said, because he always did what his brothers did.
“Then it’s settled,” the Logan with the comic book on his lap said.
“Are you reading that comic book?” his brother asked him.
“No.”
“Then can I read it?”
“Sure.” His brother handed him the comic book and he immediately turned to the salve ad. Before he lost himself in the ad again, he thought for a moment about killing the people who’d stolen the bowling trophies. He’d never killed anybody before. He turned the comic book a few pages to some characters in the comic book who were killing each other. They were using axes and it was very bloody. A hand was lying on the floor. The hand did not look happy.
He looked up from the comic book to his brother on the bed. “How are we going to kill them?” he asked.
“We’ll shoot them.”
“Good,” he said, and turned from the people in the comic book with the axes back to the salve ad. He liked the people in the salve ad because they were happy selling salve.
In his mind he pressed a doorbell.
It rang pleasantly and somebody came to the door. It was an older man. The man looked like his grandfather except that he had red hair.
“Hello,” the man said. “What can I do for you?”
“My name is Johnny Logan and I’m selling salve.”
“Come on in, Johnny. It’s hot out there. I’ll get you a big glass of lemonade and then you tell me all about this salve. And if it sounds like good stuff, I’ll buy a couple of tubes of it, and give you the names and addresses of some friends of mine who live nearby and might be interested in some salve.”
“We’ll shoot them in the heart,” his brother said.
“That’s good,” he said, without looking up from the comic book.
“Here’s your lemonade, son. Now tell me what kind of salve you’ve got here. If it’s good salve, I don’t care how much it costs.”
“This is the best salve in the world. It’s made in Chicago, Illinois.”
“Right in the fucking heart.”
‘These things began, ‘tis said, with our fathers’
“I’m dying because of all those Greeks,” Bob said.
His face was so full of tears that there wasn’t room for another tear. He tried to find enough room for one more tear but he couldn’t find it, so he stopped crying.
“What Greeks?” Constance said, and as the words left her mouth, she knew what Greeks. It was
those
Greeks. She wished that she hadn’t asked the question.
“The ones in the
Greek Anthology
,” Bob said.
“What about them?” Constance said, and then realized that she’d said it. She felt as if she’d subconsciously set a trap for herself and then fallen into it
“They’re dead,” Bob said.
Two kitchens
John and Patricia decided that they wanted a little snack before they went to sleep. It was close to midnight and their normal bedtimes. They were hungry from the sexual exercise they had just gone through.
“What time is it?” John said.
Patricia looked at the clock beside the bed because John couldn’t see it from where he was lying in the bed.
“It’s almost twelve,” she said.
“Well, let’s go get a snack and come back here and eat it in bed while I watch a little of the Johnny Carson show,” John said.
“Everything’s back to normal,” Patricia said, jumping out of bed and wiggling her ass at John.
“
HHHHHHHHEEEEEEERRRRRRRREEEEEEE’’’’’’’’’SSSSSS,
Johnny!”
“You don’t have to watch him if you don’t want to,” John said.
“I’m going to dance with Willard instead,” Patricia said. “He knows how to show a girl a good time. He does a great two-step.”
She started dancing around the room, pretending that she was holding Willard in her arms. She acted as if she were dodging something with her head. “Watch out for your beak, Willard,” she said.
John went into the kitchen. He didn’t bother to put any clothes on. He was hungry. Patricia joined him a moment later. She didn’t have any clothes on either: not a stitch. Her body was quite adequate. John was a little overweight He had a slight potbelly, but he didn’t give a damn. His whole family ran toward being a little overweight and so he was used to it and considered that he was carrying on a family tradition by having a potbelly.
He was thirty-one years old.
Patricia was six years younger.
They got along very well together and had been doing so for almost five years. He was a filmmaker and she was a school teacher.
He worked with visions and she taught Spanish.
They were pleased with what they did with their lives.
Patricia and John’s kitchen was directly underneath Bob and Constance’s kitchen and they were at this moment all in their own kitchens.
Upstairs Bob was mourning people who had been dead for over two thousand years. Constance was trying to console him. Tears were slowly drying on his face.
Downstairs John was making a turkey sandwich. He was pulling off pieces of meat from an ornate-looking turkey carcass on the table.
Patricia was pouring out big glasses of ice-cold milk to go with the sandwiches while they watched the Johnny Carson show in the bedroom, and as soon as she finished with her sandwich and glass of milk, she would be fast asleep and John would stay up with Johnny Carson for a little while and then he would join her in sleep.
“Lots of white meat on mine,” Patricia said. “And don’t short me on the mayonnaise.”
“Have I ever done that to you?” John said.
“No, but there’s always a first time for everything.”
“Jesus,” he said at exactly the same time that upstairs in the kitchen above them, Bob said, “I don’t want to cry any more for dead people.”
Constance tried to think of something to console him but she couldn’t think of anything, so she remained silent, sitting beside him at the table, holding his hand.
Of course Bob and Constance couldn’t hear what Patricia and John were saying downstairs and neither of the couples knew what the other couple was doing.
That’s one of the strange things about people living in apartment buildings. They barely know what anybody else is doing. The doors are made out of mystery,
“More mayonnaise and more pepper,” Patricia said.
“Don’t think about it anymore,” Constance said.
A visit to Kansas
The Logan brothers spent six months in Kansas looking for the stolen bowling trophies. They looked very carefully in Topeka, Dodge City, Wichita, Kansas City, etc,
etc, etc, etc,
cities, cities of Kansas:
Reserve,
Ulysses,
Pretty Prairie,
and Gas, Kansas.
They looked in the windows of houses in quiet residential neighborhoods. Maybe the person who stole the trophies was a show-off and wanted people to see the trophies in his front window like a Christmas tree.
They looked under bridges and in wheat fields.
They hung around bowling alleys, deliberately overhearing conversations, hoping that they might find a clue in listening to bowlers talking to each other.
Maybe one of them would spill the beans but it all came to nothing.
The Logan brothers spent the money that they had taken with them when they left home and they didn’t want to get jobs because that would take away valuable time from looking for the bowling trophies.
So they became minor thieves: shoplifting, breaking into parked cars, newspaper-rack coin boxes, etc. One night in Pretty Prairie they stole a rug off the clothes line in somebody’s backyard and stepped in a bed of flowers.
“Watch out for the flowers.”
“Oh,
shit!
I stepped on them.”
“Big feet!”
That’s the kind of stuff the Logan brothers were doing.
Before the bowling trophies were stolen, they had never engaged in activities like this. They were honest and looked up to as heroes, and all the mothers in town wanted their sons to grow up and be like the Logan brothers and be champion bowlers.
Toward an understanding of