• The Hawkline Monster •

The two Miss Hawklines sat back down at the table with Greer and Cameron and started telling the story of the Hawkline Monster.

“Our father built this house,” Miss Hawkline said.

“He was a scientist teaching at Harvard,” the other Miss Hawkline said.

“What’s Harvard?” Cameron said.

“It’s a famous college in the East,” Miss Hawkline said.

“We’ve never been in the East,” Greer said.

“Yes, we’ve been there,” Cameron said. “We’ve been to Hawaii.”

“That’s not East,” Greer said.

“Don’t Chinamen come from China which is in the East?” Cameron said.

“It’s not the same,” Greer said. “Saint Louis is in the East and Chicago. Places like that.”

“You mean that East,” Cameron said.

“Yeah,” Greer said. “That East.”

“The monster—” Miss Hawkline said, trying to get back to the original subject which was the monster that dwelled in the ice caves under their house.

“Yeah,” Greer said. “How in the hell did we get to talking about Hawaii? I hate Hawaii.”

“I mentioned it,” Cameron said. “Because we were talking about the East. I hate Hawaii, too.”

“Hawaii’s a dumb thing to bring up in this conversation. These women have a problem,” Greer said. “They paid us their money to take care of it and let’s get on with it and I know you hate Hawaii because I 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…”