Nebraska Gothic 3

 

                                                                                        

Written by Graham Swanson

to My Friend J

Hasel Kenny Lee used to get pulled into the teacher’s office after school. The educators moved 

mountains for her to graduate. Her father owned The Imperial Dragon, the only restaurant in town 

around since the 1980s. She was the man’s only daughter, but she seldom came to class, when she did 

she never turned in any homework.

“You're such a terrific writer! You’re so smart, you could get into any college you wanted, become anything you wanted. A doctor, an Artist, anything you want, but you have to finish your classes, Hasel.” The teachers tried to reason.

Hasel passed out onto the floor and when they tried to grab her she bit and kicked at them. She didn’t give a fuck. Her boyfriend waited outside and he had meth for her. She knew that as long as she held her legs open he’d give it to her. She hated school. She hated her teachers. She hated her father too.

All night long her boyfriend, fresh out of jail, drove her around in a beaten up truck with no back window. They made sloppy, yeasty love, feeding each other rocks and breathing in the fumes from paint cans.

“Will this hurt your baby?” He asked her because she was 7 months pregnant.

“No. It's okay.’

They made each other angry to turn each other on for more sex. He punched a hole in the wall and screamed at her. She called him trash and made fun of his shitty truck and a little house. She liked stupid men that fell for it. They didn’t care how many felonies she accumulated or that she would drop out of school later that year and have her first baby. She was a hot, hot mess with black hair and blue eyes.

Mr. Lee, her father, suffered a brain fissure. One night, something exploded in the folds of his brain, and he had to close the restaurant. He woke up in the hospital. Too much work, too much stress on a man getting older every day, almost 70 years old, orphaned in the Korean War, saw his family die, and came to the States where he made lots of money.

Girls are not supposed to run Asian restaurants, and the Chinese already didn’t like a Korean man learning their recipes to serve Krouts out in the Midwest. But he needed Hasel to take over.

Mr. Lee snuck Hasel into the kitchen one night and taught her to cook the food. The first thing he did was drag her from her friends smoking pot in a barn in the flooded river plains where the animal carcasses hang all year.

Hasel turned on music so she could work to something she enjoyed. Her father turned it off with one long finger and jabbed at her with it.

“Concentrate. I need you to cook this.”

Hasel kept burning the food and piling waste behind the sink. The old man about tore his hair out. He kept his voice down this time. His ears rang, and she gritted her teeth at him.

“fuck you, dad.” she scowled at him.

Mr. Lee would’ve slapped her, but he didn’t need anyone finding out that he was teaching her how to cook. If the restaurant next door found out, or his cousin who lived next door found out….

“I'm sorry, sweetheart. Just concentrate.”

Despite her indifference, perhaps Benzo withdrawal, she did put her brain to use and finished each dish on the menu. Her dad turned the lights on and took her to his office. He poured her a shot of whiskey.

“I'm so proud of you right now, Hasel. But you must come to work for me. The Doctor says one more stroke will kill me. He said that if something hits me in the head, or if I take a hard fall, I will die. Please. After school on Friday. Can you do that, Hasel, my love? Will you?”

“Sure, dad.”

Mr. Lee hugged her and for the first time in her life, she heard him cry. She hated the sound of it. She hated his restaurant- his sweltering dungeon. She had her own choice in mind.

Hasel didn’t go to school at all that Friday. She watched a guy named Alois cook meth in the basement of his family’s house in the majestic plains around Welles village. By the time her shift started, the party started. Everyone there let needles hang from their arms, and she let three guys fuck her, yelping and belching, fat tits hanging from their chests, toothless and scabbed, she let screw her as long as they kept the free drugs coming.

That night the Chinese man who ran the Imperial Dragon Enterprise sent an emissary to check out Mr. Lee’s restaurant.

“Mr. Lee, we’ve heard some troubling rumors about you teaching your daughter how to cook our food.”

“Yes. It's true. I can't run this place anymore. I had no choice.”

“Condolences. Where is she right now?”

“Not here.” He hung his head.

“Is it true your daughter has been in jail, Mr. Lee?”

“She made some mistakes but she’s not a bad person.”

“Mr. Lee, we’ve decided to let Mr. Zhang run this business in your absence, or you must sell it.”

“I've been the owner here for more than forty years. I’m sorry. I beg for your forgiveness.”

“Begging from a man of precarious honor means nothing. You were going to teach your girl to run our restaurant, and now she’s out there with our recipes. You will show Mr. Zhang the ropes, and then you will retire.”

When Alois got out of prison, he had lost his farm and house, so he had to move. Hasel, with her second child, Trace, a boy that Alois claimed was his, though, no one knew for sure, wanted to buy a shaded spot of land where the grass turned purple in the sunset and she could listen to the sound of the creek running in the back.

“Maybe when dad dies, we can move there.” She said. She had a felony too now. They bonded over jail and meth, and stayed close despite constant fighting. Best friends for life. They moved into an old house next to Kznucls Lodge in Prairie District- where all the old slave houses used to be who worked in his house and his farms.

The owners never came to town except to collect rent. 950$ a month for a house with one bathroom, several rooms with no light fixtures, and only one sink with running water, so they did their dishes in the bathroom. Sometimes in the bathtub.

“Please take care of this house. It's very old, and is historic.”

The landlord showed them the panels that opened to secret passages from room to room and basement to basement. Even one too small to stand- only crawl in. They had huge rooms hidden in the basement and papers going back to 1838.

Trace kept yelling about the purple lights in his closet and under the floor. he’d heard laughter as someone kept turning his night light off. Hasel screamed at him for she believed he kept getting out of bed, so she locked him in the closet for the night while the purple lights danced overhead, unlocked the door, and covered him in a blanket as he slept.

Alois drove around his cousin’s farm. He held the phone live streaming the footage to social media. He wanted to hold the AR 15 but felons can’t have guns. If they caught him holding one, he’d go right back to prison.

“He’s there.”

“Got ‘em.”

They sped up on two deer in the dew of morning. One a doe with a thin coat of fur and a younger buck with tiny antlers. They rode up along the deer in their go-cart and ran one over, backed up, turned around, and shot the other one in the back thigh. Alois cousin unloaded the entire clip and blew the animal to pieces. Then they went back to the injured doe and crushed her skull with the butt of the gun.

When Alois got home, Hasel was passed out from drinking a concoction of Absolut Vodka and NyQuil. The baby girl screamed in the crib and Alois took his “son” out of the room to show him the footage in the garage.

“We hunted them!” he explained to Trace.

“You like to hunt?”

“Yeah, they came onto our land, so we hunted them.”

“Can we eat them?”

“You can’t eat these ones.” Alois laughed and laughed. “When I was your age and your bitch mom hadn’t gotten me in trouble 'n lost my farm, I used to have a shotgun.”

‘You did?”

“Yeah, and I’d go around and shoot the cats, the goats, and the sheep. It was fun! One time I cut a cat in half and it crawled on the barn floor so I cut its head off with a machete.” Alois laughed so hard that he couldn’t articulate anymore.

“What’s that?”

“A real big knife" Alois caught his breath. "Maybe someday I’ll show you how to use one since the damn government thinks I can’t have my guns anymore.”

Trace liked to fix things. He walked around the house with a toy drill and a screwdriver. He took a break from playing with trucks outside and in to inspect the damage. He went around and found cracks in the wall where one of the bricks went missing. He applied his toy drill, it made a sound and lit up. Then he twisted his screwdriver around a little.

“All done. It’s fixed.”

Then he’d go to the sink that only ran cold water. He applied his tools.

“Fixed it.”

Then to the part of the floor where the board came right off the nails.

“Fixed it up.”

Then he saw his mom’s phone left where she hurled it against the counter during last night’s fight. The glass of the screen still shattered from when she slammed her fist into it.

Trace picked up, pressed the keys on the side, pushed his screwdriver into the auxiliary port, shook it around, and pressed the drill into a fragment of the screen, the screen turned purple and it turned on. The screen went from purple to pink, to green to orange, bright and blinding, and a burst of happy laughter came from the mic. Elated, he set it back down and told his mom that he fixed her phone.

“You got onto my phone?” She hit him over the head with a bag of sugar and pressed him against the wall by the throat. “You little asshole.”

Hasel ripped the drill from his hands and tossed it into a heap of garbage, dirty carpets, uneaten fast food, and cold pizza boxes.

Outside Alois tore the grass out of the backyard with a shovel. He told himself there would be a sandbox for his “boy” to play in, but he almost uprooted the entire yard and hadn’t gotten any sand yet.

Trace pointed at a light bulb burned out in a lamp.

“I fix that, mom.”

“Fuck you.” She got down to his size and bore her eyes into his head. “There’s nothing wrong with that lamp.”

One night, Alois brought home something special from Tractor Supply. A box full of chirping, and full of movement. A dozen little yellow baby chickens. The kids cooed and applauded them in joy. 4 died under the heat lamp that day. 3 more died of infection spreading from their lungs into their heads. 2 more got carried off my cats, and one more got eaten by a rat. Only two remained.

One night Trace followed the purple aura from his closet, down the low tunnel. He crawled on his hands and knees beckoned by a bright singing voice and the impact of a power drill. He pushed down the tunnel until it ended, and he saw the purple aura glowing along the cracks of a trapdoor overhead. He pressed it open and found himself in the garage. He stood over the two surviving chicks sleeping in their box of straw.

He grabbed one like he always did, he petted it and kept trying to grab its wing. It didn’t like that. He only tore out some feathers, so the chick pecked him so hard that it drew blood.

Trace grabbed it by the neck and flung it around until it stopped making noise and hung there in his fingers. Then he tore off its wings, tore out it's feet, and tore the beak. Then he reached inside of its wounds to tear out some organs. Then he moved to the next bird and did the exact same thing.  

Art: CrOPPED, Xelanoj Art, 2022.