Richard Brautigan - The Hawkline Monster - A Gothic Western

They crouched with their rifles in the pineapple field, watching a man teach his son how to ride a horse. It was the summer of 1902 in Hawaii.

They hadn’t said anything for a long time. They just crouched there watching the man and the boy and the horse.

What they saw did not make them happy.

“I can’t do it,” Greer said.

“It’s a bastard all right,” Cameron said.

“I can’t shoot a man when he’s teaching his kid how to ride a horse.” Greer said. “I’m not made that way.”

Greer and Cameron were not at home in the pineapple field. They looked out of place in Hawaii. They were both dressed in cowboy clothes, clothes that belonged to Eastern Oregon.

Greer had his favorite gun: a 30:40 Krag, and Cameron had a 25:35 Winchester. Greer liked to kid Cameron about his gun. Greer always used to say, “Why do you keep that rabbit rifle around when you can get a real gun like this Krag here?”

They stared intently at the riding lesson.

“Well, there goes 1,000 dollars apiece,” Cameron said. “And that God-damn trip on that God-damn boat was for nothing. I thought I was going to puke forever and now I’m going to have to do it all over again with only the change in my pockets.”

Greer nodded.

The voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii had been the most terrifying experience Greer and Cameron had ever gone through, even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn’t die and Greer finally had to say to the deputy sheriff, “Please die because we don’t want to shoot you again.” And the deputy sheriff had said, “OK, I’ll die, but don’t shoot me again.”

“We won’t shoot you again,” Cameron had said.

“OK, I’m dead,” and he was.

The man and the boy and the horse were in the front yard of a big white house shaded by coconut trees. It was like a shining island in the pineapple fields. There was piano music coming from the house. It drifted lazily across the warm afternoon.

Then a woman came out onto the front porch. She carried herself like a wife and a mother. She was wearing a long white dress with a high starched collar. “Dinner’s ready!” she yelled. “Come and get it, you cowboys!”

“God-damn!” Cameron said. “It’s sure as hell gone now. 1,000 dollars. By all rights, he should be dead and halfway through being laid out in the front parlor, but there he goes into the house to have some lunch.”

“Let’s get off this God-damn Hawaii,” Greer said.

Cameron was a counter. He vomited nineteen times to San Francisco. He liked to count everything that he did. This had made Greer a little nervous when he first met up with Cameron years ago, but he’d gotten used to it by now. He had to or it might have driven him crazy.

People would sometimes wonder what Cameron was doing and Greer would say, “He’s counting something,” and people would ask, “What’s he counting?” and Greer would say, “What difference does it make?” and the people would say, “Oh.”

People usually wouldn’t go into it any further because Greer and Cameron were very self-assured in that big relaxed casual kind of way that makes people nervous.

Greer and Cameron had an aura about them that they could handle any situation that came up with a minimum amount of effort resulting in a maximum amount of effect.

They did not look tough or mean. They looked like a relaxed essence distilled from these two qualities. They acted as if they were very intimate with something going on that nobody else could see.

In other words, they had the goods. You didn’t want to fuck with them, even if Cameron was always counting things and he counted nineteen vomits back to San Francisco. Their living was killing people.

And one time during the voyage, Greer asked, “How many times is that?”

And Cameron said, “12.”

“How many times coming over?”

“20.”

“How’s it working out?” Greer said.

“About even.”

Even now Miss Hawkline waited for them in that huge very cold yellow house… in Eastern Oregon… as they were picking up some travelling money in San Francisco’s Chinatown by killing a Chinaman that a bunch of other Chinamen thought needed killing.

He was a real tough Chinaman and they offered Greer and Cameron seventy-five dollars to kill him.

Miss Hawkline sat naked on the floor of a room filled with musical instruments and kerosene lamps that were burning low. She was sitting next to a harpsichord. There was an unusual light on the keys of the harpsichord and there was a shadow to that light.

Coyotes were howling outside.

The lamp-distorted shadows of musical instruments made exotic patterns on her body and there was a large wood fire burning in the fireplace. The fire seemed almost out of proportion but its size was needed because the house was very cold.

There was a knock at the door of the room.

Miss Hawkline turned her head.

“Yes?” she said.

“Dinner will be served in a few moments,” came the voice of an old man through the door. The man did not attempt to come into the room. He stood outside the door.

“Thank you, Mr. Morgan,” she replied.

Then there was the sound of huge footsteps walking down the hall away from the door and eventually disappearing behind the closing of another door.

The coyotes were close to the house. They sounded as if they were on the front porch.

“We give you seventy-five dollars. You kill,” the head Chinaman said.

There were five or six other Chinaman sitting in the small dark booth with them. The place was filled with the smell of bad Chinese cooking.

When Greer and Cameron heard the price of seventy-five dollars they smiled in that relaxed way they had that usually changed things very rapidly.

“Two hundred dollars,” the head Chinaman said, without changing the expression on his face. He was a smart Chinaman. That’s why he was their leader.

“Two hundred and fifty dollars. Where’s he at?” Greer said.

“Next door,” the head Chinaman said.

Greer and Cameron went next door and killed him. They never did find out how tough the Chinaman was because they didn’t give him a chance. That’s the way they did their work. They didn’t put any lace on their killings.

While they were taking care of the Chinaman, Miss Hawkline continued to wait for them, naked on the floor of a room filled with the shadows of musical instruments. Lamp-aided, the shadows played over her body in that huge house in Eastern Oregon.

There was also something else in that room. It was watching her and took pleasure in her naked body. She did not know that it was there. She also did not know that she was naked. If she had known that she was naked she would have been very shocked. She was a proper young lady except for the colorful language that she had picked up from her father.

Miss Hawkline was thinking about Greer and Cameron, though she had never met them or even heard about them, but she waited eternally for them to come as they were always destined to come, for she was part of their gothic future.

Greer and Cameron caught the train to Portland, Oregon, the next morning. It was a beautiful day. They were happy because they liked riding the train to Portland. “How many times now?” Greer asked.

“8 times straight through and 6 times we got off,” Cameron said.