Richard Brautigan - The Hawkline Monster - A Gothic Western

Greer sighed.

“What about another name to tell the difference between you?” Greer said.

“There is no difference between us. We’re the same person,” one of the women said.

“They’re both Miss Hawkline,” Cameron said, to make it final. “I like Miss Hawkline and now we’ve got 2 of them. Let’s call them both Miss Hawkline. Who gives a fuck in the long run?”

“That sounds fine,” Miss Hawkline said.

“Yes. Just call us Miss Hawkline,” Miss Hawkline said.

“I’m glad that’s taken care of,” Cameron said. “You have 1 monster in the basement. Right? And he needs killing.”

“Not in the basement,” Miss Hawkline said. “In the ice caves.”

“That’s the basement,” Cameron said. “Tell us some more about this God-damn creature. Then we’ll go down and blow its fucking head off.”

The two Miss Hawklines sat back down at the table with Greer and Cameron and started telling the story of the Hawkline Monster.

“Our father built this house,” Miss Hawkline said.

“He was a scientist teaching at Harvard,” the other Miss Hawkline said.

“What’s Harvard?” Cameron said.

“It’s a famous college in the East,” Miss Hawkline said.

“We’ve never been in the East,” Greer said.

“Yes, we’ve been there,” Cameron said. “We’ve been to Hawaii.”

“That’s not East,” Greer said.

“Don’t Chinamen come from China which is in the East?” Cameron said.

“It’s not the same,” Greer said. “Saint Louis is in the East and Chicago. Places like that.”

“You mean that East,” Cameron said.

“Yeah,” Greer said. “ That East.”

“The monster—” Miss Hawkline said, trying to get back to the original subject which was the monster that dwelled in the ice caves under their house.

“Yeah,” Greer said. “How in the hell did we get to talking about Hawaii? I hate Hawaii.”

“I mentioned it,” Cameron said. “Because we were talking about the East. I hate Hawaii, too.”

“Hawaii’s a dumb thing to bring up in this conversation. These women have a problem,” Greer said. “They paid us their money to take care of it and let’s get on with it and I know you hate Hawaii because I was standing right beside you on the fucking place. I know you remember that because you remember every fucking thing.”

“The monster—” the other Miss Hawkline said, trying again to get back to the original subject which was the monster that dwelled in the ice caves under their house.

“I think the problem is this,” Cameron said, totally ignoring Miss Hawkline and the monster. “If Miss Hawkline had said, ‘ back East,’ then I would have known right away what East she was talking about. She said, ‘ in the East,’ so I thought about Hawaii where we just came from. See, it’s all because she said, ‘ in the East,’ instead of ‘ back East.’ Every idiot knows that Chicago is back East.”

This was a very strange conversation that Greer and Cameron were having. They’d never had a conversation like this before. They had never talked to each other this way before either.

Their conversations always ran along very normally except for the fact that Cameron counted the things that passed through their lives and Greer had gotten used to that. He had to because Cameron was his partner.

Greer broke the spell of their conversation by suddenly turning his energy away from Cameron which was a very hard thing to do, and saying to Miss Hawkline, “What about your father? How does he figure in with this monster you’ve got hanging around your basement?”

“It’s not in the basement!” Miss Hawkline said, getting a little mad. “It’s in the ice caves that are underneath the basement. We have no monster in our basement! We just have our laboratory there. “

She had become infected by the just-finished conversation between Greer and Cameron about the East. “Let’s start all over again,” the other Miss Hawkline said. “Our father built this house…”

“He was teaching chemistry at Harvard and he also had a huge laboratory at home that he used for private experiments,” Miss Hawkline said. “Everything was going along fine until the afternoon that one of the experiments got out of the laboratory and ate our family dog in the back yard. The next door neighbors were having a wedding reception in their garden when this happened. It was at this time that he decided to move to some isolated part of the country where he could have more privacy for his work.

“He found this location and built this house out here about five years ago with a huge laboratory in the basement and he was working on a new experiment that he called The Chemicals. Everything was going along fine until—”

“Excuse me,” Greer said. “What about the experiment that ate your dog?”

“I’m coming to that,” Hiss Hawkline said.

“I’m sorry,” Greer said. “I was just a little curious. Continue. Let’s hear what happened, but I already think I know what happened. Tell me if I’m wrong: one of the experiments ate your father.”

“No,” Miss Hawkline said. “The experiment didn’t exactly eat our father.”

“What exactly did it do?” Greer said.

Cameron was very carefully listening to everything.

“We’re getting off on the wrong track again,” the other Miss Hawkline said. “I don’t know what’s happening. This is very easy to explain but suddenly it’s so complicated. I mean, I can’t believe how strange our conversation has turned.”

“It is sort of weird, isn’t it?” Greer said. “It’s like we can’t say what we mean.”

“I just forgot what we were talking about,” Miss Hawkline said. She turned to her sister. “Do you remember what we were talking about?”

“No, I don’t,” the other Miss Hawkline said. “Was it Hawaii?”

“We were talking about Hawaii a little while ago,” Greer said. “But we were talking about something else. What was it?”

“Maybe it was Hawaii,” Cameron said. “We were talking about Hawaii. Isn’t it a little bit colder in here now?”

“It does seem colder, doesn’t it?” Miss Hawkline said.

“Yes, it’s definitely colder,” the other Miss Hawkline said. “I’ll put some more coal in the stove.”

She got up and went over to the stove. She opened the lid on top to find the stove filled with coal because she had put some fresh pieces in just before she had sat down with her sister to talk to Greer and Cameron about the monster.

“Now, we were talking about Hawaii, right?” the other Miss Hawkline said.

“That’s right,” Greer said.

“It’s a miserable place,” Cameron said.

“I think we’d better go into another room,” Miss Hawkline said. “This fire isn’t warm enough.”

They left the kitchen and went into one of the front parlors. They didn’t say anything as they walked down the long hall to the parlor.

As soon as they stepped into the parlor, Greer turned to Miss Hawkline and almost shouted, “We were talking about the fucking monster, not Hawaii!”

“That’s right,” she almost yelled back and then they stood there staring at each other for a moment before Miss Hawkline said, “Something happened to our minds in the kitchen.”

“I think you’d better tell us all about that monster right now,” Cameron said. He looked grim. He didn’t like his mind fucked around with by anybody, including monsters.

The parlor was exquisitely furnished in an expensive and tasteful manner. They were all sitting down in beautiful chairs facing each other except for Cameron who was sitting on a couch by himself.