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

in the basement!”
    Cameron looked at the two Miss Hawklines. Everybody stopped talking because they could see that Cameron was going to say something.
    “You girls don’t seem to have much grief about your father’s disappearance,” Cameron said, finally. “I mean, you’re not exactly in mourning.”
    “Our father brought us up a special way. Mother died years ago,” Miss Hawkline said. “Grief doesn’t figure into it that much. We loved our father a great deal and that’s why we are going to finish his experiment with The Chemicals.”
    She was a little mad about this time. She wanted to get onto the killing of the monster and away from superfluous conversations about things that she wasn’t really that much interested in: like mortal grief.
    “Tell us more about what happened in the kitchen,” Cameron said.
    “Things like that happen,” the other Miss Hawkline said. “They’re always strange occurrences and they seldom duplicate themselves. We never know what’s going to happen next.”
    “Once we found green feathers in all of our shoes,” Miss Hawkline said. “Another time we were sitting in a parlor upstairs talking about something when suddenly we were nude. Our clothes just disappeared off our bodies. We never saw them again.”
    “Yes,” the other Miss Hawkline said. “That made me so fucking mad. I really liked that dress. I bought it in New York City and it was my favorite dress.”
    Greer and Cameron had never heard an elegant lady use the word fuck before. They would get used to it, though, because the Hawkline women swore a lot. It was something they had learned from their father who had always been very liberal with his language, to the point of being a legend at Harvard.
    Anyway: on with the story…
    “Has anything bad ever happened?” Cameron said.
    “No, all the things that happen are like children’s pranks except the child has supernatural powers.”
    “What does supernatural mean?” Cameron said.
    The Miss Hawklines looked at each other. Cameron didn’t like the way they looked at each other. All the fuck they had to do was to tell him what it meant. That was no big deal.
    “It means out of the ordinary,” Miss Hawkline said.
    “That’s good to know,” Cameron said. He did not say it in a pleasant way.
    “Are you ever afraid of what those chemicals might come up with next?” Greer said, taking over the conversation from Cameron and trying to put it on a more comfortable level.
    The Miss Hawklines were relieved. They hadn’t meant to hurt Cameron’s feelings with the word supernatural. They knew it was a dumb thing that they had done, looking at each other, wishing they hadn’t done it.
    “They’re never evil things,” Miss Hawkline said. She was going to say malicious, but she changed her mind. “Just very annoying sometimes like my favorite dress disappearing off my body.”
    “What are those chemicals supposed to do when they’re finished?” Greer said. “And is this the same stuff that ate the dog?”
    “We don’t know what it’s supposed to do,” Miss Hawkline said. “Our father told us when The Chemicals were completed that the answer to the ultimate problem facing mankind would be solved.”
    “What’s that?” Cameron said.
    “He didn’t tell us,” Miss Hawkline said.

• The Dog •
    “You didn’t answer the question about the dog,” Cameron said.
    “No, it wasn’t The Chemicals,” Miss Hawkline said. “They haven’t eaten anything. They’re just mischievous.”
    “Then what ate the dog?” Cameron said. He really wanted to know what ate the dog.
    “It was an earlier batch of some stuff that Daddy had mixed up,” Miss Hawkline said.
    “Did it have anything to do with The Chemicals?” Cameron said. He had just picked up the habit of calling Professor Hawkline’s last experiment The Chemicals.
    Miss Hawkline did not want to say what she was about to say. Cameron was watching carefully the expression on her face just before