Dead As Dutch

Merle Munyon was a ‘no-good drifter,’ at least that’s how Munyon’s mom referred to his father. Merle abandoned his common-law wife and three sons when Munyon was five years old and Munyon’s memory of those early years was hazy at best, but Merle’s stories stuck with him in vivid detail long after. It was unclear how much actual truth was contained in them, but for a young boy eager to lap up the tales of adventure, it didn’t matter much. They were real enough and helped Munyon escape the miseries of a life on the run—one step ahead of the interminable debt collectors and ruthless gamblers chasing Merle down for money owed.

  Mutt Munyon was his great-granddaddy and his favorite story of all. Mutt found a fortune in gold during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late nineteenth century in the Yukon region of northwest Canada. He lived in a grand style, a flamboyant tycoon with a taste for fine silk suits, conspicuous diamonds, and champagne baths. Mutt owned dance halls in the boom towns of the era like Dawson City and Skagway and flashed his cash in every manner of excess possible. But, like Merle a century later, he fell victim to the twin evils of card games and alcohol that left him penniless and soon dead from a typhoid epidemic that swept through the region.

  Munyon never lived even a single day north of the American border where his Canadian father’s family established roots, and after Merle disappeared one day never to return, he spent the rest of his childhood moving from town to town in upstate New York. That’s where his Native American mother, Rina Deerhouse, was raised on Mohawk tribal land. With Merle out of the picture (according to the scuttlebutt, he fled to northern Quebec to avoid retribution for cheating a well-connected politician at poker, only to perish a few years later, falling through the ice on a lake and drowning during one of his frequent bouts of drunkenness), she supported her three young sons by toiling on the housekeeping staff at whatever cut-rate motel along the I-90 corridor had an opening that didn’t require references. From Buffalo to Syracuse, Utica to Troy, the family survived on Rina’s meager income as a maid and whatever handouts came their way. They took refuge in rundown trailer parks and school attendance became a hit-or-miss proposition for the trio of brothers—mostly miss—which is why Munyon never made it past the eighth grade.

  The paucity of a formal education, however, didn’t prevent Munyon from utilizing the street skills he had acquired to pursue a career in a number of enterprises, all of the criminal variety. In short order, he advanced from petty offenses like five-finger discounts and picking pockets, to his most lucrative specialty—grand theft auto. (Munyon pilfered his first from a supermarket parking lot at the age of twelve, a1973 Chevy Malibu SS 350 that he took for a joy ride and abandoned a half-hour later.) The price of doing business in the stolen car racket was numerous felony convictions, which resulted in guest stints in a series of juvenile detention facilities throughout the state of New York and encompassed the bulk of his teen years. At some point along his unrighteous path, he lost track of Rina (Munyon guessed that the delusional behavior that often plagued his mother—her claims of alien visitations and full-body probes led to dismissals by one employer after another—landed her in an institution, a thought that comforted him in an odd sort of way), but did manage to stay in touch with his twin brothers, Mick and Merv. Both enlisted in the US Navy and boasted to him in their infrequent letters about their exciting lives crisscrossing oceans and carousing at ports of call around the world.

  Although his extensive rap sheet prevented Munyon from a tour of duty in the regular armed services, once he was released from lockup he hitchhiked his way to the New Jersey docks and was hired on as a deckhand performing menial maintenance tasks for a barge and tug company. Once his sea legs were established, he yearned to travel beyond East Coast waters and when an opportunity on an international cargo ship arose, he jumped at the chance to become an AB—an Able Seaman. For the next ten years he visited countries he had never heard of and lived the rough and tumble life of a seaman filled with days of backbreaking labor and nights of boozing and brawling. It was the latter that almost landed him in a Philippines jail after he cracked a crooked Filipino police captain in the skull with a half-empty San Miguel bottle, after the man fleeced Munyon in a game of five-card draw. Munyon absconded with a pot reputed to be in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand dollars and, thanks to his shipmates, bum-rushed away and spirited aboard his vessel, which weighed anchor early the next morning. Now Munyon was a wanted fugitive (warrants on bogus, trumped-up charges of piracy and money laundering had been issued across the Far East and beyond, calling for his arrest on sight) and forced to leave behind the high seas he grew to love for an incognito life just like his father had before him.

  Munyon returned to New York State and took up residence in the southern- tier city of Binghamton, where he worked as a minimum wage grease monkey at a local garage and moonlighted to make ends meet as a part-time tow truck operator. His uncanny ability to enter any locked car within seconds and hot wire any engine soon caught the attention of Cleo Tucker, who utilized his services to repo hard-to-access vehicles for her asset recovery company: the ones that required someone with the know-how to get in and get out fast before the deadbeat owners knew what hit them. One thing led to another, and within six months they were standing before a justice of the peace for a modest marriage ceremony attended by a handful of Cleo’s relatives, but no one from Munyon’s side. Mick and Merv had been dishonorably discharged from the navy after being nabbed for selling government-issued property on the black market and sentenced to two years in the brig at Miramar, California. Subsequent postcards that reached Munyon came from Bali, where the brothers operated illegal tour boat expeditions for well-heeled poachers seeking to hunt down the rare Komodo Dragon in their native Indonesian island habitats. Mick and Merv vanished during the devastating Christmas tsunami of 2004 that swept across the Indian Ocean, and no further word was heard from them since. (Subsequent reported sightings proved false, although two Americans fitting their descriptions were detained for a time by Australian authorities. Details were sketchy, but had something to do with the unlicensed and unsafe operation of a swim-with-the-sharks cage they promoted to tourists as an added bonus with any of their fishing charter packages.)

  It wasn’t long after a weekend in the honeymoon suite (complete with a heart-shaped Jacuzzi and water bed) in a Catskill lodge that Munyon and Cleo’s union began to unravel. Unable to cope with the demands of a wife who was his boss during the day and bossed him around at home at night, Munyon found solace in bottles of bourbon while Cleo found her own in the arms of an endless array of male companions. The combination of his brothers’ disappearance and Cleo’s infidelity (she left him a good-riddance-drop-dead-get-lost message, smiley face included, scribbled in frosted pink lipstick on the bathroom mirror, the day she eloped with her carnie beau) drove Munyon into seclusion deep in the Catskills, where he carved out a meager subsistence off the land and the small profits earned from the whiskey he produced in his still.