Carnival Lights

Chapter 7

“What’d he say?” Kris asked.

“He thinks you’re Mexicans.” Jacob laughed. “What’s it say?”

“Gimme a sec,” Kristin said, tilting the paper toward a streetlight.

The boy stared into the black maw of the sky. “C’mon. You Indian girls are so slow.”

“Anti-war rally,” Kristin read. “Saturday, August 20th at Loring Park, 10 a.m. Get the U.S. out of Vietnam now.”

“Meh,” Jacob said. “Who cares.”

“You don’t?” Kristin folded it and slid it into her back pocket.

“I’ve got more pressing concerns right here.” He tapped his chest.

“I wanna go,” Kristin said. “It could be our first undercover assignment as the Minneapolis Mod Squad!” She imagined them running down alleys, chasing some child molester like they did in the show.

“There’s lots of pigs.” Jacob pretended to smoke a joint. “Lots and lots and lots of them. Lots. Sueys! You better watch out because they’ll grab you up and no one will hear from you again. Ever.” He regarded the dark sky, a violet streak slashing the horizon. “People disappear.”

Fear shot through Kristin. Her dad used to say that he’d make her disappear if she ever told anyone what he did to her. Said it was the easiest thing in the world he could do out there in the middle of this godforsaken nowhere goddamn reservation, just like he’d done to her.... Then he would stop, knowing what he said would hit her like a Mack truck. By not finishing the sentence with “mother” he kept his daughter in a terror she could not name.

“Well, you’re a hippie,” Kris shot back, afraid and angry he wouldn’t play along with her Mod Squad fantasy.

“Nah, I’m not into peace. I’m a fighter.” Jacob punched the air. “Just like Mr. Muhammed Ali!”

“You look like a hippie,” Kristin said, “in that tie-dye shirt.” Violence, the offspring of fear, surged through her. “You look like, like that singer. What’s his name?” she asked. “Bill. Bob. Yah, Bob. All that curly hair.” Her words came out mean, the way she felt.

“You’re a big talker,” Sher jumped in. “And big talkers always got something to hide.”

“Nah. Not me,” Jacob said, oblivious to their anger. He put his arms above his head like he was cheering. “I’m the champ.”

Sher stared at him, his body a shadow. Kristin pressed her eyelids together, the way she did when her father was on top of her. She felt crazy, like there were too many emotions to make sense of. She contained herself that way, to stop the feelings flooding through her so strong and huge they had to come from somewhere else, from someone else, from long ago, passed down through her family. She rolled over rocks, through prickly bright w**d beds, until she went under, hit the silty bottom. Sometimes, it takes generations for a feeling to emerge. And when it does, it is ten-fold stronger.

Virginia, Minnesota, July 1969

Virginia, Minnesota, July 1969Em knew how to be still. She knew how not to cry out. In Virginia, the summer that the white men put dusty boot prints on the moon’s face, Em waited for the scratchings. She studied the door and the narrow, tiny room with one small window face level, that is, if she were able to stand. Formerly a girl servant’s bedroom. It had just enough room for a body to lie prone with a foot deep chest of drawers (the matron’s gowns she’d worn to East Coast and Duluth political functions when a girl hung over the servant girl as she slept). The dowels were long since absent, but the metal racks were still drilled into the walls.

Em thought of her mother. How the only time she cried out was when the hardest stories were told. She cried about the one when six, squalling Indian babies taken from Fond du Lac on their way to an orphanage in Cincinnati were tossed overboard into Lake Superior, off a grain cargo headed to Toledo. So the story went, something went wrong, according to the breed who reported the story to his relatives. He had been working the ship. He didn’t know why, just that the ship’s captain ordered a first mate to throw the Indian babies into the icy waters two miles out from Duluth. “View for ship first,” the Scottish captain had said in his broken English. “Be of upmost positive actions not viewed. Wait two miles.” He held up two fingers. “Two. Then,” and he made a dumping movement with his arms.

However, the Scottish captain told the one and only Slav working a ship in America, who knew virtually no English, and mistook his two fingers to mean two minutes. The Slav waited five minutes as he thought it strange to do this in full sight of the lighthouse. Yet orders were orders, was what he’d been taught and, still in view of the lighthouse on the rock, the Slav tossed the infants one by one into the frothy waters of Lake Superior, the lake the size of Austria whose temperatures never rose above 55 degrees at the surface. Across the way, the lighthouse attendant witnessed what appeared to be sacks of flower being tossed into the waters, but upon closer inspection with his government-issued binoculars he saw what he believed to be the bald head and arms of an infant whose sack came loose. He told his wife, who told her sister, who passed it down the generations until decades later, a descendant saw an article in the Duluth Tribune while sipping cold press coffee one sunny August morning in 2013 on The Screaming Gull’s patio that overlooked the giant shimmering lake. The article said Indian women and babies had been sold on the ships for decades and, because growing up she’d heard the story of what her great-great-great-grandfather saw, she believed it.

Duluth Tribune .