The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

by Richard Brautigan

  Greer and Cameron stood there with their guns while the giant butler lay there alone and forgotten with his death. Greer took a deep breath. What the hell? You might as well do one thing as another.

  “First things first,” Cameron said. “Let’s move this body out of the hall. Where do you want it?”

  “That’s a good question,” Miss Hawkline said. “We could put him in his room or we could lay him out in a front parlor. I don’t want to bury him now because I want to get fucked. I really want to get fucked. What a time to have a dead butler on your hands.”

  She was almost a little mad that the giant butler had taken this particular time and place to die. He looked awesome lying there in the hall.

  “Hell, this is too much to think about,” the other Miss Hawkline said. “Let’s just leave him here for a while and take care of getting fucked.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about him going any place,” Cameron said.

  So they just left the giant old butler lying dead on the hall floor and went off to get fucked, taking along with them a 30:40 Krag, a sawed-off shotgun, a.38 and an automatic pistol.

  Thanatopsis Exit #2

  Greer as he made love to Miss Hawkline kept thinking about Magic Child. Miss Hawkline had a body that was exactly the same in its appearance and delightful movement as Magic Child’s.

  They were making love in a beautiful bedroom upstairs. The room had many delicate feminine things that were unfamiliar to Greer. The only thing wrong with the room was the cold. It was very cold in the room because of the ice caves under the house.

  Greer and Miss Hawkline made love under many blankets in an incredibly ornate brass bed. Their passion had not allowed time to be spent building a fire in the fireplace.

  Greer kept wondering as they made love if this Miss Hawkline were Magic Child. At one moment he almost said the name Magic Child to see if she would respond, but then he decided not to because he knew that Magic Child was dead and it did not make any difference in which Miss Hawkline she was buried.

  After Making Love Conversation

  After they finished making love, Miss Hawkline lay gently cuddling up against him and then she said, “Don’t you think that it’s kind of strange for us to be up here making love while the butler is lying down there dead in the hall and we haven’t done anything about it?”

  “Yes, it is a little strange,” Greer said.

  “I wonder why we didn’t do anything about his body. You know, my sister and I are really very fond of Mr. Morgan. I’ve been lying here for the last few minutes thinking about why we haven’t done anything about him down there. It’s not a very gracious thing to go off fucking while your family butler, whom you love like an uncle, is lying dead in the hall of your house. That has got to be a very peculiar way to react.”

  “You’re right,” Greer said. “It sure is.”

  Mirror Conversation

  In a bedroom down the hall a similar conversation was taking place between Miss Hawkline and Cameron. They had just finished making some very enthusiastic love in which Cameron had not a single thought about this woman being Magic Child. He had really enjoyed their fucking together and had not allowed any intellectual process to cloud his pleasure. He used his mind for more important things: like counting.

  “I guess we’ll have to do something about your butler,” Cameron said.

  “That’s right,” Miss Hawkline said. “I completely forgot about him. He’s lying dead in the hall. He fell over dead and we left him there to come up here and get some fucking in. It totally slipped my mind. Our butler is dead. He’s down there dead. I wonder why we didn’t do anything about his body.”

  “I asked you if you wanted to do anything about it down there but you girls wanted to come up here and get fucked, so we came up here and that’s what we’ve done,” Cameron said.

  “What?” Miss Hawkline said.

  “What do you mean what?” Cameron said.

  Miss Hawkline lay very puzzled beside Cameron. There was a slight furrow between her eyes. She was in such a state of consternation that it was almost like slight shock.

  “We suggested it?” she said, after a few moments of trying to figure out what events led them away from the body of their beloved dead giant butler and upstairs into the arms of love-making.

  “We… suggested… it?” she repeated very slowly.

  “Yes,” Cameron said. “You insisted upon it. I thought it was a little strange myself, but what-the-hell, you’re running this show. If you want to fuck instead of taking care of your dead butler, that’s your business.”

  “This is very unusual,” Miss Hawkline said.

  “You’re right there,” Cameron said. “It ain’t your ordinary run-of-the-mill thing to do. I mean, I’ve never fucked before with a butler lying spread-out dead in the hall downstairs.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” Miss Hawkline said. By now she had turned her head away from Cameron and was staring up at the ceiling.

  “He’s dead,” Cameron said. “You’ve got 1 dead butler downstairs in the hall.”

  Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey, Won’t You Come Home?

  Meanwhile, down in the laboratory above the ice caves everything was very quiet except for the movement of a shadow. It was a shadow that just barely existed between forms. At times the shadow would almost become a form. The shadow would hover at the very edge of something definite and perhaps even recognizable but then the shadow would drift away into abstraction.

  The laboratory was filled with strange equipment. Some of it was of Professor Hawkline’s invention. There were many work tables and thousands of bottles of chemicals and a battery to make electricity out here in the Dead Hills where there was no such thing.

  The laboratory was very cold. Actually, it was frozen because of its proximity to the ice caves underneath it.

  There were some cast iron stoves around the laboratory which were used to thaw it out when the Hawkline sisters came down here to work, trying to unravel the mystery of The Chemicals.

  Though there was no formal light in the room, there was still a slight portion of light coming from somewhere which for the moment wasn’t actually a definite place. The light was coming from somewhere in the laboratory but it was not possible to tell where the light originated.

  The light of course was needed to establish the shadow as it played like a child’s spirit between object and abstraction.

  Then the light became a definite place and the shadow was then related to the place where the light was coming from which was a large leaded-crystal jar filled with chemicals.

  This jar of chemicals was the reality and mission of Professor Hawkline’s lifework. The Chemicals were what he had placed his faith and energy in before he disappeared. It was now being completed by his two beautiful daughters who lay in bedrooms upstairs with two professional killers, and his daughters were wondering why they had gone off making love to these men while the freshly-dead body of their beloved giant butler lay ignored, unattended and not even covered up on the front hall floor.

  The Chemicals that resided in the jar were a combination of hundreds of things from all over the world. Some of The Chemicals were ancient and very difficult to obtain. There were a few drops of something from an Egyptian pyramid dating from the year 3000 B.C.

  There were distillates from the jungles of South America and drops of things from plants that grew near the snowline in the Himalayas.

  Ancient China, Rome and Greece had contributed things, too, that had found their way into the jar. Witchcraft and modern science, the newest of discoveries, had also contributed to the contents of the jar. There was even something that was reputed to have come all the way from Atlantis.

  It had taken a tremendous amount of energy and genius to establish harmony between the past and present in the jar. Only a man of Professor Hawkline’s talent and dedication could have joined these chemicals together in friendship and made them good neighbors.

  There of
course had been the earlier mistake that had caused Professor Hawkline and his family to leave the East but that batch had been flushed down the toilet and the professor had started over again out here in the Dead Hills.

  Everything had been fully under control with the ultimate results of his experiments with The Chemicals promising a brighter and more beautiful future for all mankind.

  Then Professor Hawkline passed electricity from the battery through The Chemicals and began the mutation which led to an epidemic of mischievous pranks occurring in the laboratory and eventually getting upstairs and affecting the quality of life in the house.

  It started off with the professor finding black umbrellas in unlikely places in the laboratory and green feathers scattered about and once there was a piece of pie suspended in the air and the professor took to thinking too long about things that were not important. Once he spent two hours thinking about an iceberg. He had never spent more than a few moments previously in all of his life thinking about icebergs.

  This mischief led to the clothes vanishing off the bodies of the Hawkline women upstairs and other things too silly to recount.

  Sometimes the professor would think about his childhood. He would do this for hours at a time and then afterwards not be able to remember what he had been thinking about.

  Then one day a horrible monster started howling and banging on the iron door that separated the ice caves from the laboratory. The monster was so strong that it shook the door. The professor and his daughters didn’t know what to do. They were afraid to open the door.

  The next day one of the Hawkline sisters went down to the laboratory to bring the professor some lunch. When he was working hard he didn’t like to come upstairs to eat.

  Because of his immense dedication he continued working, trying to reestablish the balance of The Chemicals while the monster from time to time hollered and banged on the door with its tail.

  His daughter found the door to the ice caves open and the professor gone. She went to the door and yelled down into the caves, “Daddy, are you in there? Come out!”

  A horrible sound came from deep in the caves and started coming through the darkness of the caves toward the open door and Miss Hawkline.

  The door was immediately locked and one of the sisters, dressed like and thinking she was an Indian, went to Portland to find men qualified to kill a monster but who also possessed discretion, for they wanted to undo the mistake their father had made without public attention and finish his experiment with The Chemicals in a way that he would have approved of for the benefit of all mankind.

  But they did not know that the monster was an illusion created by a mutated light in The Chemicals, a light that had the power to work its will upon mind and matter and change the very nature of reality to fit its mischievous mind. The light was dependent upon The Chemicals for sustenance as an unborn baby relies upon the umbilical cord for supper.

  The light could leave The Chemicals for brief periods of time but it had to return to The Chemicals to revitalize itself and to sleep. The Chemicals were like a restaurant and a hotel for the light.

  The light could translate itself into small changeable forms and it had a shadow companion. The shadow was a buffoon mutation totally subservient to the light and quite unhappy in its role and often liked to remember back to the days when harmony reigned in The Chemicals and Professor Hawkline was there, singing popular songs of the day:

  “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home?

  She moans de whole day long;

  I’ll do de cooking, darling, I’ll pay de rent;

  I knows I’ve done you wrong.”

  As he poured a drop of this and a drop of that into The Chemicals in hopes for a better world, little realizing that each drop led him closer and closer to the day when he would pass electricity through The Chemicals and suddenly evil mischief would be created and the harmony of The Chemicals would be lost forever and soon the mischief would be turned in all its diabolical possibilities upon himself and his lovely daughters.

  A lot of the contents of The Chemicals were not happy with what had happened since the electricity had been passed through them and the mutation occurred that created evil.

  One of the chemicals had managed to completely separate itself from the rest of the compound. The chemical was very unhappy with the recent turn of events and the disappearance of Professor Hawkline because it had wanted very much to help mankind and make people smile.

  The chemical now cried a lot and kept to itself near the bottom of the jar.

  There were of course chemicals who were basically evil in nature and glad to be free of the professor’s good-neighbor policy who exulted now in the goofy terror the light, which was the Hawkline Monster, inflicted upon its hosts, the Hawklines, and anybody who came near them.

  The light possessed unlimited possibilities and took a special pride in using them. Its shadow was disgusted with the whole business and trailed, dragging its feet reluctantly behind.

  Whenever the Hawkline Monster left the laboratory, drifting up the stairs and then slipping like melted butter under the iron door that separated the laboratory from the house, the shadow always felt as if it were going to throw up.

  If only the professor were around, if only that terrible fate had not befallen him, he would still be singing:

  “Me and Mamie O’Rorke,

  Tripped the light fantastic,

  On the sidewalks of New York.”

  The Hawkline Orchestra

  Greer and Cameron and the Hawkline women, who were still mystified by their behavior, returned clothes to their bodies and all joined together in a music room on the same floor as the bedrooms that they had just finished making love in.

  Greer and Cameron put their guns down on the top of a piano. Miss Hawkline went downstairs and made some tea and brought it back up on a silver platter and they all sat in the music room surrounded by harpsichords, violins, cellos, pianos, drums, organs, etc. It was a very large music room.

  To make tea Miss Hawkline had to step around the body of the giant butler in the hall downstairs.

  Greer and Cameron had never had tea before but they decided to try it because what-the-hell with all the things that were going on in this huge yellow house that was so weird that it almost breathed, straddling some ice caves that penetrated like frozen teeth deep into the earth.

  Greer and Cameron had wanted to do something with the dead body of the giant butler as soon as they were finished with the living bodies of the Hawkline women, but the women insisted that they all have tea first before getting onto the disposal of the butler who was still sprawled out like an island in the hall.

  A freshly-started fire was burning in the music room fireplace.

  “Do you like your tea?” Miss Hawkline said. She was sitting beside Greer on a couch next to a harp.

  “It’s different,” Greer said.

  “What do you think, Cameron?” the other Miss Hawkline said.

  “It doesn’t taste like coffee,” Cameron said. He counted all the musical instruments in the room: 18. Then he said to the closest Miss Hawkline, “You have enough musical stuff here to start a band.”

  “We’ve never thought about it in that way,” the Miss Hawkline said.

  The Butler Possibilities

  “What are we going to do with the butler’s body?” Cameron said.

  “That is a problem,” Miss Hawkline said. “We’ll really miss him. He was like an uncle to us. Such a good man. Huge but gentle as a fly.”

  “Why don’t we start by moving him out of the hall. It’s hard walking around him,” Cameron said.

  “Yes, we should move him,” the other Miss Hawkline said.

  “Why didn’t we do that before we sat down here and started drinking this stuff?” Cameron said, looking disdainfully at his cup of tea. It was very apparent that Cameron was not going to be converted to the geniality of tea drinking. It was, you might say, not his cup of tea.

 
; “I think we should bury him,” Miss Hawkline said, thinking for a few seconds.

  “You have to get him out of the hall if you want to put him into the ground,” Cameron said.

  “Precisely,” the other Miss Hawkline said.

  “I think we’ll need a coffin,” Miss Hawkline said.

  “2 coffins,” Cameron said.

  “Do you gentlemen know how to make a coffin?” the other Miss Hawkline said.

  “Uh-uh,” Greer said. “We don’t make coffins. We fill them.”

  “I think it would draw too much attention to us if we were to go into town and have one of the townspeople make us one,” Miss Hawkline said.

  “Yes, we don’t want anybody coming out here and investigating into our business,” the other Miss Hawkline said.

  “Definitely not,” Miss Hawkline replied, taking a very lady-like sip of tea.

  “Let’s plant him outside,” Greer said. “We’ll just dig a hole, put him in it, cover him up and it’ll all be taken care of.”

  “We don’t want to bury him close to the house,” Cameron said. “The ground’s frozen hard around this place and I’ll be fucked if I’m going to dig a hole that big in frozen ground.”

  “We’ll dig a hole outside of the frozen ground and then drag him out of the hall and put him into the hole,” Greer said.

  “It’s sad to think of our beloved butler Mr. Morgan in these terms,” Miss Hawkline said. “I knew he was getting along in years and that someday he would die because, as we all know, death is inevitable, but I had never thought about what a problem the hugeness of his body would make. It’s just something you don’t think about.”

  “You didn’t think he was going to turn into a dwarf when he died, did you?” Cameron said.