Richard Brautigan - The Hawkline Monster - A Gothic Western

He looked again at the chandelier but the strange light was gone. He did not know that the light was hiding on the pool table, near a side pocket, and there was a shadow hiding there, too.

“That light seemed familiar,” Greer said. “I’ve seen it someplace before.”

The light and the shadow held their breath, waiting for Greer to leave the room.

As they descended the spiral staircase to the main floor of the house, Miss Hawkline said to her sister, “The funniest thing happened a little while ago.”

“What was that?”

“It’s really strange,” she said.

“Well, what was it?”

Greer and Cameron were trailing behind the Hawkline sisters. They moved so gracefully that Greer and Cameron were almost spellbound. The sisters moved without making a sound on the stairs. They moved in the same manner as two birds gliding slowly on the wind.

Their voices delicately punctuated the air like the invisible movement of peacock fans.

“l found some Indian clothes hanging in my closet. I didn’t put them there,” Miss Hawkline said. “Do you have any idea where they came from?”

“No.” her sister said. “I’ve never seen any Indian clothes around here.”

“It’s really strange,” Miss Hawkline said. “They’re our size.”

“I wonder where they came from,” the other Miss Hawkline said.

“A lot of very strange things have been happening around here.” Miss Hawkline answered.

Greer and Cameron looked at each other and they had something more to think about.

When they finally arrived at the body of the dead butler, they really had a surprise waiting for them. One of the Hawkline women put her hand up to her mouth as if to stifle a scream. The other Miss Hawkline turned white as a ghost. Greer sighed. Cameron put his finger in his ear and scratched it. “What the fuck next?” he said.

Then they just stood there staring at the butler’s body. They stared at it for a long time.

“Well,” Greer said, finally. “It’s going to make burying him a lot easier.”

Lying on the floor in front of them was the body of the butler but it was only thirty-one inches long and weighed less than fifty pounds. The dead body of the giant butler had been changed into the body of a dwarf. It was almost lost in folds of giant clothes. The pant legs were barely occupied and the coat was like a tent wrapped around the corpse of the butler.

At the end of a huge pile of clothes, there was a small head sticking out of a shirt. The collar of the shirt surrounded the head like a hoop.

The expression, which was of quiet repose, gone to meet his Maker, as they say, on the butler’s face had remained unaltered in his transformation from a giant into a dwarf but of course the expression was much smaller.

It did make burying the butler simpler. While Greer dug a small grave outside the house, just beyond the influence of frost, Miss Hawkline went upstairs and got a suitcase.

After the funeral with appropriate words of bereavement over a very small grave and a little cross, everybody went back into the house and gathered in a front parlor.

Greer and Cameron no longer had their guns with them. They had put them away in the long narrow trunk which was back beside the elephant foot umbrella stand. They only carried a gun when they were going to use one. The rest of the time the guns stayed in the trunk.

Cameron put some coal on the fire.

The two Miss Hawklines were sitting next to each other on a love seat. Greer sat across from them in a huge easy chair with a bear’s head carved on the end of each armrest.

Cameron stood beside the fire, after having helped it out, facing the room and the troubled eyes of his contemporaries. He looked over at a table that had some cut-crystal decanters of liquor and fine long-stemmed crystal glasses that were keeping company on a silver platter.

“I think we need something to drink,” he said.

Miss Hawkline got up from the love seat and went over to the table and poured them all glasses of sherry which they were momentarily sipping.

She returned to the side of her sister on the love seat and everybody was exactly as they were before Cameron made the suggestion except they had glasses in their hands. It had been a delicately choreographed event like making different prints of a photograph except that one of the prints had glasses of sherry in it.

“I’d like to ask you girls a question,” Greer said, but first he took a sip from his glass of sherry. Everybody in the room watched him carefully take his.sip. He held the liquor in his mouth for a moment before he swallowed it. “Have either of you ever heard of somebody called Magic Child?” he said.

“No,” Miss Hawkline said.

“The name’s not familiar,” the other Miss Hawkline replied. “It’s a funny name, though. Sounds like an Indian name.”

They both looked puzzled.

“That’s what I thought,” Greer said, looking over at Cameron standing beside the fireplace. The coal burned silently and smoke journeyed upward in departure from this huge yellow house standing in a field of frost at the early part of this century.

Greer as he looked over at Cameron suddenly noticed that part of the fire was not burning and part of the smoke just beyond it was not moving upward but was just hovering above flames of a slightly different color that did not burn.

He thought about the strange reflection in the pool-room chandelier. The fire that did not burn resembled that reflection.

He looked away from Cameron and back to the Hawkline women sitting primly beside each other on the love seat. “Who is Magic Child and what does she have to do with us?” Miss Hawkline said.

“Nothing,” Greer said.

“I guess we should think about killing the monster down there in the basement. Cameron said and the Hawkline women didn’t say anything. “We’ve been here all day and we haven’t gotten around to that yet. So many things have been happening. I’d like to get that God-damn monster out of the picture, so we can get onto something else because there sure as hell seems to be something else here to get onto. What do you think, Greer? Time for a little monster killing?”

Greer looked casually over at Cameron but at the same time his vision took in the fireplace. The fire that did not burn and the smoke that did not move were gone. It was a normal fire now. He looked back at the Hawkline women and casually but carefully around the room.

“Did you hear me?” Cameron said.

“Yeah, I heard you,” Greer said.

“Well, what do you think? A little monster killing?”

The Hawkline sisters were both wearing identical pearl necklaces. The necklaces floated gracefully about their necks.

But some of the pearls were glowing more brightly than the other pearls and some locks of hair hanging long about their necks seemed slightly darker than the rest of their hair. “Yes, we should get around to killing the monster,” Greer said. “That’s what we’re here for.”

“Yeah, I think that’s what we should do,” Cameron said. “And then find out what’s causing all these crazy things to happen around here. I never saw a man buried in a suitcase before.”

The house was by now casting long shadows out across the frost as the sun was nearing its departure from the Dead Hills and Eastern Oregon and all the rest of Western America while Greer was asking the Hawkline women some last minute questions.