The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (2 page)

“Miss Hawkline will tell you what she wants done,” Magic Child said.

“Can’t even get a hint out of you, huh?” Greer said, smiling.

Magic Child looked out the window at the Columbia River. There was a small boat on the river. Two people were sitting in the boat. She couldn’t tell what they were doing. One of the people was holding an umbrella, though it wasn’t raining and the sun wasn’t shining either.

Greer and Cameron gave up trying to find out what they were supposed to do but they were curious about Magic Child. They had been surprised by her voice because she didn’t sound like an Indian. She sounded like an Eastern woman who’d had a lot of booklearning.

They’d also taken a closer look at her and had seen that she wasn`t an Indian.

They didn’t say anything about it. They had the money and that’s what counted for them. They figured if she wanted to be an Indian that was her business.

• Gompville •

The train only went as far as Gompville, which was the county seat of Morning County and fifty miles away by stagecoach to Billy. It was a cold clear dawn with half-a-dozen sleepy dogs standing there barking at the train engine.

“Gompville,” Cameron said.

Gompville was the headquarters of the Morning County Sheepshooters Association that had a president, a vice-president, a secretary, a sergeant at arms and bylaws that said it was all right to shoot sheep.

The people who owned the sheep didn’t particularly care for that, so both sides had brought in gunmen from Portland and the attitude toward killings had become very casual in those parts.

“We’re running it tight,” Greer said to Magic Child as they walked over to the stagecoach line. The stage to Billy left in just a few moments.

Cameron was carrying a long narrow trunk over his shoulder. The trunk contained a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump shotgun, a 25:35 Winchester rifle, a 30:40 Krag, two .38 caliber revolvers and an automatic .38 caliber pistol that Cameron had bought from a soldier in Hawaii who was just back from the Philippines where he had been fighting the rebels for two years.

“What kind of pistol is that?” Cameron had asked the soldier. They had been in a bar having some drinks in Honolulu.

“This gun is for killing Filipino motherfuckers,” the soldier had said. “It kills one of those bastards so dead that you need two graves to bury him in.”

After a bottle of whiskey and a lot of talk about women, Cameron had bought the gun from the soldier who was very glad to be on his way home to America and not have to use that gun any more.

• Central County Ways •

Central County was a big rangy county with mountains to the north and mountains to the south and a vast loneliness in between. The mountains were filled with trees and creeks.

The loneliness was called the Dead Hills.

They were thirty miles wide. There were thousands of hills out there: yellow and barren in the summer with lots of juniper brush in the draws and a few pine trees here and there, acting as if they had wandered away like stray sheep from the mountains and out into the Dead Hills and had gotten lost and had never been able to find their way back.

...poor trees...

The population of Central County was around eleven hundred people: give or take a death here and a birth there or a few strangers deciding to make a new life or old-time residents to move away and never to return or come back soon because they were homesick.

Just like a short history of man, there were two towns in the county.

One of the towns was close to the northern range of mountains. That town was called Brooks. The other town was close to the southern range of mountains. It was called Billy.

The towns were named for Billy and Brooks Paterson: two brothers who had pioneered the county forty years before and had killed each other in a gunfight one September afternoon over the ownership of five chickens.

That fatal chicken argument occurred in 1881 but there was still a lot of strong feeling in the county in 1902 over who those chickens belonged to and who was to fault for the gunfight that killed both brothers and left two widows and nine fatherless children.

Brooks was the county seat but the people who lived in Billy always said, “Fuck Brooks.”

• In the Early Winds of Morning •

Just outside of Gompville a man was hanging from the bridge across the river. There was a look of disbelief on his face as if he still couldn’t believe that he was dead. He just refused to believe that he was dead. He wouldn’t believe he was dead until they buried him. His body swayed gently in the early winds of morning.

There was a barbed-wire drummer riding in the stagecoach with Greer and Cameron and Magic Child. The drummer looked like a fifty-year-old child with long skinny fingers and cold-white nails. He was going to Billy, then onto Brooks to sell barbed wire.

Business was good.

“There’s a lot of that going on around here now,” he said, pointing at the body. “It’s those gunmen from Portland. It’s their work.”

He was the only one talking. Nobody else had anything to say out loud. Greer and Cameron said what they had to say inside their minds.

Magic Child looked so calm you would have thought that she had been raised in a land where bodies hung everywhere like flowers.

The stagecoach drove across the bridge without stopping. It sounded like a minor thunderstorm on the bridge. The wind turned the body, so that it was watching the stagecoach drive up the road along the river and then disappear into a turn of dusty green trees.

• “Coffee” with the Widow •

A couple of hours later, the stagecoach stopped at Widow Jane’s house. The driver always liked to have a cup of “coffee” with the widow on his way to Billy.

What he meant by a cup of coffee wasn’t really a cup of coffee. He had a romance going with the widow and he’d stop the stagecoach at her house and just parade all the passengers in. The widow would give everybody a cup of coffee and there was always a big platter of homemade doughnuts on the kitchen table.

Widow Jane was a very thin but jolly woman in her early fifties.

Then the driver, carrying a ceremonial cup of coffee in his hand, and the widow would go upstairs. All the passengers would sit downstairs in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating doughnuts while the driver would be upstairs with the widow in her bedroom having his “coffee.”

The squeaking of the bedsprings shook the house like mechanical rain.

• Cora •

Cameron had brought the trunk full of guns into the house with him. He didn’t want to leave the guns unattended in the stagecoach. Greer and Cameron never carried guns on their persons not unless they intended to kill somebody. Then they carried guns. The rest of the time the guns stayed in the trunk.

The barbed-wire drummer sat there in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in his hand and from time to time he would look down at the trunk that was beside Cameron, but he never said anything about it.

He was curious enough, though, about Magic Child to ask her what her name was.

“Magic Child,” Magic Child said.

“That’s a pretty name,” he said. “And if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re quite a pretty girl.”

“Thank you.”

Then, to be polite, he asked Greer what his name was.

“Greer,” Greer said.

“That’s an interesting name,” he said.

Then he asked Cameron what his name was.

“Cameron,” Cameron said.

“Everybody here’s got an interesting name,” he said. “My name is Marvin Cora jones. You don’t come across many men who’s middle name is Cora. Anyway, I haven’t and I’ve been to a lot of places, including England.”

“Cora is a different kind of middle name for a man,” Cameron said.

Magic Child got up and went over to the stove and got some more coffee for Greer and Cameron. She also poured some for the barbed-wire drummer. She was smiling. There was a huge platter of doughnuts on the table and everybody was eating them. Widow Jane was a good cook.

Like a mirror the house continued to reflect the motion of the bed upstairs.

Greer and Cameron each had a glass of milk, too, from a beautiful porcelain pitcher on the table. They liked a glass of milk now and then. They also liked the smile on Magic Child’s face. It had been the first time that Magic Child had smiled.

“They named me Cora for my great-grandmother. I don’t mind. She met George Washington at a party. She said that he was really a nice man but he was a little shorter than what she had expected,” the barbed-wire drummer said. “I meet a lot of interesting people by telling them that my middle name is Cora. It’s something that gets people’s curiosity up. It’s kind of funny, too. I don’t mind people laughing because it is sort of funny for a man to have the name of Cora.”

• Against the Dust •

The driver and the widow came down the stairs with their arms in sweet affection around each other. “It certainly was nice of you to show that to me,” the driver said.

The widow’s face was twinkling like a star.

The driver acted mischievously solemn but you could tell that he was just playing around.

“It’s good to stop and have some coffee,” the driver said to everybody sitting at the table. “It makes travelling a little easier and those doughnuts are a lot better than having a mule kick you in the head.”

There was no argument there.

• Thoughts of July 12, 1902 •

About noon the stagecoach was rattling through the mountains. It was hot and boring. Cora, the barbed-wire drummer, had dozed off. He looked like a sleeping fence.

Greer was staring at the graceful billowing of Magic Child’s breasts against her long and simple dress. Cameron was thinking about the man who had been hanging from the bridge. He was thinking that he had once gotten drunk with him in Billings, Montana, at the turn of the century.

Cameron wasn’t totally certain but the man hanging from the bridge looked an awful lot like the guy he had gotten drunk with in Billings. If he wasn’t that man, he was his twin brother.

Magic Child was watching Greer stare at her breasts. She was imagining Greer touching them with his casually powerful-looking hands. She was excited and pleased inside of herself, knowing that she would be fucking Greer before the day was gone.

While Cameron was thinking about the dead man on the bridge,
perhaps it was Denver where they had getter: drunk together
, Magic Child was thinking about fucking him, too.

• Binoculars •

Suddenly the stagecoach stopped on top of a ridge that had a meadow curving down from it. There was an Old Testament quantity of vultures circling and landing and rising again in the meadow. They were like flesh angels summoned to worship at a large spread-out temple of many small white formerly-living things.

“Sheep!” the driver yelled. “Thousands of them!”

He was looking down on the meadow through a pair of binoculars. The driver had once been an officer, a second lieutenant in the cavalry during the Indian Wars, so he carried a pair of binoculars with him when he was driving the stagecoach.

He had gotten out of the cavalry because he didn’t like to kill Indians.

“The Morning County Sheepshooters Association has been working out this way,” he said.

Everybody in the stagecoach looked out the windows and then got out as the driver climbed down from his seat. They stretched and tried to unwind the coils of travel while they watched the vultures eating sheep down below in the meadow.

Fortunately, the wind was blowing in an opposite manner so as not to bring them the smell of death. They could watch death while not having to be intimate with it.

“Those sheepshooters really know how to shoot sheep,” the driver said.

“All you need is a gun,” Cameron said.

• Billy •

They crossed the Shadow Creek bridge at suppertime.
There’s nobody hanging from this bridge:
Cameron thought as the stagecoach drove into Billy.

There was an expression of pleasure on Magic Child’s face. She was happy to be home. She had been gone for months, doing what Miss Hawkline had sent her to do, and they sat beside her. She looked forward to seeing Miss Hawkline. They would have many things to talk about. She would tell Miss Hawkline about Portland.

Magic Child’s breathing had noticeably changed in sexual anticipation for the bodies of Greer and Cameron. They of course didn’t know that Magic Child would soon be fucking them.

They could see that her breathing had changed but they didn’t know what it meant. They thought she was happy to be home or something.

Billy was noisy because it was suppertime. The smell of meat and potatoes was heavy on the wind. All the doors and windows in Billy were open. It had been a very hot day and you could hear people eating and talking.

Billy was about sixty or seventy houses, buildings and shacks built on both sides of a creek that flowed through a canyon whose slopes were covered with jumper brush that gave a sweet fresh smell to things.

Billy had three bars, an cafe, a big mercantile store, a blacksmith, and a church. It didn’t have a hotel, a bank or a doctor.

There was a town marshal but there wasn’t a jail. He didn’t need one. His name was Jack Williams and he could be a mean motherfucker. He thought putting somebody in jail was a waste of time. If you caused any trouble in Billy, he’d punch you in the mouth and throw you in the creek. The rest of the time he ran a very friendly saloon, The Jack Williams House, and would buy a drink every morning for the town drunk.

There was a graveyard behind the church and the minister, a Fredrick Calms, was always trying to raise enough money to put a fence around the graveyard because the deer got in there and ate the flowers and stuff off the graves.

For some strange reason, it made the minister mad whenever he saw some deer among the graves and he’d start cursing up a storm, but nobody ever took putting a fence up around the graveyard very seriously.