The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western by Richard Brautigan Read Free Book Online

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…”

• Hawaii Revisited •
    “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,