Marco & Misty is the second of three installments from influential writer Chris Kraus’s in-progress book, The Four Spent the Day Together, which are being published exclusively by the Pioneer Works Broadcast. Inspired by the real-life crime the Mesabi Trail Murder, the book dives deep into the small-town dramas of Hibbing, Minnesota—in the state’s Iron Range—leading up to a homicide on a snowmobile trail. Read the first installment here.

Thief River Falls - Hibbing, August 2018

Marco Guillermo Corona hooked up with Misty Hall in Thief River Falls in the summer just before she turned 18. What Marco liked about Misty was she was quiet, no drama, not too intense. Kept herself out of trouble, but so long as it did not involve her personally she didn’t care or even seem to notice what other people did. It was as if she’d practiced moving through the world with her eyes half closed. She was a big girl, better looking on Snap than IRL for sure but she had soft white skin and beautiful red hair. This was his first time being with a redhead. The other good things about Misty were: she wasn’t jealous, it didn’t seem to matter if he fooled around a little bit, and most importantly she wasn’t underage.

Because Marco liked hanging out with kids. Not little kids, he was not a pervert, but girls just as they’re getting little tits and getting into it. Kids old enough to smoke his weed and laugh at all his jokes. Marco was fat, twenty-three, and mostly unemployed. He didn’t have a lot of friends his age. Marco liked hanging out with boys that age as well.

Up to this point he’s had very little trouble with the police. A big, dumb, goofy guy who tries to get along with everyone and kind of blurs into the background. Marco liked, equally, trucks, Trump, drinking, [rapper] Kevin Gates, getting high, Brown Power, the Confederate flag, and Native American culture. His mom Linda Gibson is almost 100% Red Lake Chippewa. She grew up entirely on the rez but she kind of turned herself into a Mexican by marrying his dad, Luis Corona, whom she met around the time she turned 16.  Luis was working as a cook at the 7 Clans Casino south of town. Marco can’t remember much about his dad. He had some immigration issues and he moved back to Durango in 2002 when Marco was six and his little brother Javier was four.

Marco has a photo that he’s kept, taken just before his father left. He and Javier are sitting on the steps outside the house, after Javier’s first day of school. Javier’s hair is freshly cut and he’s all dressed up in a new plaid shirt, smiling sweetly at their father. Wearing a pair of baggy thrift store jeans and a t-shirt that’s too big for him, Marco holds a half-eaten candy bar, smiling vacantly on his sugar high someplace beyond the camera. For a while, this photo summed them up. Marco got transferred from Thief River Falls High to the Northwest Learning Center when he was 14. Almost immediately, he stopped attending. Javier, their mother’s favorite, stayed in school. Tall and lean, Javier ran track, played soccer, and just missed out on a football scholarship to Bemidji State. After that he did some stupid shit, getting drunk and setting fires, but then he settled down and got a job at Arctic Cat, still hanging around town and waiting for something else to happen.

Neither Marco nor Javier has ever met a single person from their father’s family. His name is on their birth certificates but they found out later that the whole time he was living with them, he had a wife and three kids back in Mexico. So when their mom hooked up with their step-dad Esteban, she didn’t even really need to get divorced because her marriage to their dad was never legal. She and Esteban got married right away, and she had their little sister Alejandra.

At first it wasn’t clear to Marco and Javier who their step-dad Esteban was, or what he did. A wizened, scary-looking older guy, he was away a lot. But eventually it gelled. Marco and Javier were in middle school when Esteban got shot outside a stash house in a town called Earlimart in central California. Their mom was eight months pregnant with the baby she’d name Jesus Javier. After that, you’d think the five of them would be completely fucked, but things turned out okay. Officially his mom got government benefits and a small tribal grant, but other money seemed to come her way. Her Facebook page was full of baby pictures, red rose gifs, and lipstick hearts with Sur 13 Familia Terce written out in cursive script. Whenever someone in their family needed something bad enough, it would be there.

They consider me a criminal but I got a heart of gold, this is one of Marco’s favorite lines from a Stitches rap, pretty much sums me up Marco thinks. But except for sharing drugs with kids he’s hardly a criminal at all. By the time Marco met Misty Hall he was 23 years old with a record that was completely clean, except for this single nothing case that’s been dogging him since September 2017.

It started out as no big thing, a sleepover he’d organized one Friday night at his sister Alejandra’s place, since he was still living, basically, with his mother. Alli was at work til 2, and his friends Jasmin, Zack, Mya, and Yolanda all came around. They had some beers, got high, and then watched the movie War for the Planet of the Apes. Zack, a hyper-focused white kid living with his uncle, kept talking about the plot, how it was an allegory for Trump’s border wall and SARS-2, the avian flu, but the rest of them just liked passing joints and watching all the apes ride through the snow on horseback. Zack thought that shot was an allusion to Ulrike Ottinger’s film Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia, about a nomadic tribe led by Warrior Princess Ullun Iga, galloping across the steppes but Really, don’t you see? he said, The apes are us! By the time the movie finished everyone was too crunk to move, so Marco got out some blankets and pillows and they fell asleep together on the floor.

Zack woke up first, at 7. Looking through his phone, he saw a code-red alert for two missing kids, Jasmin and Mya, who were, like him, both twelve years old. While they slept, Jasmin’s mom had called the cops and now photos of the girls were being sent to every Minnesota phone. Waking up, Marco took charge and flushed all the weed and empty vapes, even though so far nobody knew that they were there. Remember? he told all the girls. Nothing happened, don’t be snitching. And no one did. He’d tried kissing Mya on the lips and moving his hands up Jasmin’s legs but both of the girls pushed him away. Okaaay. His favorite Stitches album, No Snitching Is My Statement, was an inspiration. No snitching was the one belief that everybody shared. And then Jasmin left, and Marco drove the rest of them to the water tower and they all walked home from there.

The problem was, one of his sister Allie’s neighbors snitched when they saw Jasmin walking through the parking lot. By the time Marco got back, three flashing squad cars were waiting for him at the apartment.

The cops interviewed everybody twice but everyone was cool, no snitching, and in the end the only charge they filed was Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor because of all the empty beers, a gross misdemeanor. His mom arranged the $3,000 bail. In the end it all came down to two years on probation.

But probation was a fucking pain. He failed the pee test once, missed an appointment, got pulled over once for driving while revoked and bang, they’re threatening him with a year in jail again. He got free on the same $3,000 bail, but this time they didn’t give him a public defender. His mom wanted to ask his step-dad’s friends for help, but Javier thought that was a bad idea. Why get in debt over this stupid shit? So far they’ve both stayed clear of them.

Ten days before Misty’s eighteenth birthday a warrant was issued for Marco’s arrest. It was mid-August, a week before everyone was going back to school. Misty was still living at the group home on State Street she’d been placed in, hating it, and working part-time at the Dairy Queen. She had no intention of going back to Thief River Falls High School and repeating all the 10th grade classes that she’d failed last year. At this rate she’d be, like, 21 by the time she finished senior year. Almost everyone who stayed in school was tall and blonde because apparently the town was settled by Norwegians.

Except for when she was with Marco, Misty basically hated Thief River Falls. It was a small town of 8000 mostly assholes three hours east of Fargo with a factory that made snowmobiles and ATVs. Two years ago, when Misty’s grandma beat her up and threw her out, the group home on State Street was the only bed they had for her. The Child Protective Services lady seemed so nice. Misty knew the lady knew she cut herself, but the woman didn’t say a word about self-harm, she acted like she’d never seen the scars. Telling them about her grandma was the only time that Misty snitched. But all that happened was she ended up going from a bad situation into something worse.  She’d thought about running away a bunch of times but Thief River Falls was a two and a half hour drive from Hibbing, and of course she didn’t have a car. They said the town was seventy miles from Canada, which was hard to believe because she’d never met a Canadian.

Misty met Marco in June when she and her girlfriend Belle were babysitting his sister Alejandra’s kids. Alli was always short of cash and sometimes Marco, who was around a lot, would get them high instead. He was actually the big brother, but he seemed closer to them in age: a big goofy guy who worshipped Kevin Gates and even looked like him—the same fat cheeks, a mustache, and a beard styled the same way. Marco wanted to be a rapper. He’d watched every episode of The Vampire Diaries…and she could really talk to him. The devil asked me how I knew my way around the halls of hell … I told him I did not need a map for the darkness I knew so well. So long as there was an Us against a Them there was a reason she woke up crying half the time and everything felt so bad. Marco was 23 years old, no kids, and even though he said he lived for family it was really just him, Javier, and Alli. He believed in love, he was depressed a lot. He had a van. Marco wasn’t Misty’s first but he was the first who actually seemed proud of going around with her. He took her to all the secret places he and Javier knew when they were kids. In Hibbing she’d never thought once about being white because everyone she hung around with was, but here in Thief River Falls she saw it was a thing that maybe made him like her more. He was all about Brown Power half the time, but who he actually wanted to be with was the white girl with the long red hair. He put his arm around her in the van and kissed her neck and even smelled her hair.

Marco wasn’t home when the cop delivering the warrant stopped by his mother’s house. It was, as Zack would have said, ironic—her husband Javier trafficked tons of shit for years completely unmolested (except for getting shot) and now Marco’s become a fucking fugitive over half a case of empty beers.

The fugitive thing freaked Misty out. She’s stayed out of trouble all her life—a little weed, some pills maybe, but no hard drugs. She may look dumb but Misty knows exactly who to avoid. Except for shoplifting with her friend Bailey when they were 12 she never broke the law. She started thinking: maybe the best thing for Marco to do was leave. But where? They were all broke so there was no point thinking about moving to the Cities. Besides, they didn’t really know anybody there.

The easiest place to go back to was Hibbing. Before saying anything about it to Marco she called her grandma’s boyfriend Ronald. Misty got along okay with Ronald, even though you could say he was the reason all the trouble started. Although in fact that wasn’t right, Ronald didn’t do anything, it was her grandma’s psychotic raving, the way she usually did when she was coming off a binge. Ronald drank a bit but that was all. He worked. Maybe things had settled down?

And Ronald was very nice. He said he’d talk to Grandma Jean and then he called her back. He said her grandma missed her. The best thing was, he’d traded someone for an old RV this summer. She and Marco could sleep there while they were looking for an apartment.

Except for going to concerts in the Cities, Marco never left Thief River Falls but he didn’t want to go to jail. Avoiding cops was questionable in a town this small. Still—moving there alone with Misty to her family place seemed a little premature. What if she got pregnant? They’d have to get engaged. So he asked Javier to come along. Javier was still waiting for something else to happen. So far it hadn’t. Maybe this was the opportunity.

They got to Hibbing a few days before Misty turned eighteen. Almost immediately things blew up. Grandma Jean was doing meth and saying racist shit. The three of them were crammed into the RV without a toilet, and Misty wept because her birthday sucked.  Finally Ronald gave them 700 bucks and called Landlord Bob, a guy he’d done some maintenance for. Bob owned or managed dozens of houses and apartments right in town where all the kids lived. Bob could surely hook them up, then Ronald could stop being in the middle and watch the game and drink his beer in peace. ♦