Death Dream (16 page)

"Vietnam was a crock," he said. "I'm sorry your brother got killed, but it was all for nothing and you know it."

"Do I? I know a lot of things but I don't know that."

Muncrief stepped back and waited for the other shoe to fall.

"I want to give you the opportunity to do something for your country, Mr. Muncrief," Smith said with murderous calm. "I'm giving you the chance to atone for running away during the Vietnam period."

Muncrief blinked at him.
Holy God, does he know or doesn't he? Does he have the information or not? Is he just dangling me over the coals? Could it be that the government really doesn't know about me?

KYLE MUNCRIEF

He was born of a woman who had mistakenly believed that a son would force the man she was living with to marry her. It was the second time she had tried to gain such a hold on him; she already had a two-year-old daughter. Even though she named the boy after his father, the man left her and the two children, fled from Baltimore altogether for parts unknown. Somehow she blamed Kyle for that. His earliest memories were of her beating him, screaming that he was no damned good, that he was a mistake, a failure.

His sister took care of him while their mother was away from their one-room flat and even while she was home. Not much more than a baby herself, his sister Crystal fed and clothed him, bathed him in the kitchen sink and showed him the only love he knew.

Kyle's mother had run away from her stern Baptist parents in Georgia, the kind who had written her off the family rolls as if she had died. She knew she could not go back to them—she did not want to, in any event. She had no skills to speak of; she wandered through a succession of menial jobs, either quitting or getting herself fired within a week or so. She began to augment the welfare checks she received from the state with occasional liaisons with other men, seeking with deepening despair someone who could end her poverty and loneliness.

She did not realize she was a prostitute until a pair of hard-faced men pushed their way into their shabby flat one afternoon and told her that from now on she would turn over half her earnings to them. In return they would protect her from the police. And from violence. Then they showed her a taste of the violence. Afterward they took turns fucking her.

Kyle was six years old, sitting terrified on the surplus army cot that was his bed, clinging to his eight-year-old sister, while the men beat and raped his mother. His sister threw a blanket over them both but nothing could muffle their mother's screams and cries.

For four years he lived in hell. His mother turned into a zombie, dazed on drugs most of the time, bringing home men who laughed and drank and took off their clothes and did things to his mother, who also laughed and drank and took off all her clothes. After the men left his mother always crouched naked on her sagging bed, bent over almost double, rocking back and forth for what seemed like hours. Then she would go to the filth-encrusted toilet in the bathroom they shared with the woman next door and vomit as if she were trying to empty herself completely.

He was under strict orders to stay in his cot under his thin blanket whenever his mother brought a man to the room. His sister always stayed there with him, frozen numb as a statue, holding him so tightly sometimes he thought he would die from lack of air.

Kyle watched terrified from under the covers of his cot the night that one drunken sailor insisted that his sister join him and his mother in bed.

"It's all right, Crystal dear," his mother had said, almost as drunk as the sailor on the bottle of vodka he had brought with him. "Come on here next to Mommy."

Kyle could feel his sister trembling but she let go of him and got off the cot and climbed onto the bed with her mother and the strange, grinning man. Crystal began crying as the sailor and her mother took off her clothes, her whimpers of fear growing to terrified wails until her mother smacked her sharply across her bare buttocks and snapped, "Behave yourself!"

Even with the blanket pulled tightly over his head Kyle knew they were hurting her. Crystal screamed when the sailor penetrated her and Kyle could stand it no longer.

He leaped out of the bed and flung himself at the naked sailor. Drunk as he was, the sailor easily fended off the skinny ten-year-old's ineffectual blows and knocked him spinning off the bed. He laughed as Kyle climbed slowly to his feet, rubbing the side of his head, standing in his tee shirt with his stubby bare legs and hairless genitals exposed.

"You jealous, kid?" the sailor asked. "So maybe you wanna get fucked too, hah?" Kyle ran to the drawer beside the sink where the knives were.

"Don't you dare!" his mother yelled as Kyle pulled the bread knife from the drawer. The sailor, grinning lopsidedly, got up from the bed. His softening penis was dark with Crystal's blood. He walked slowly across the bare floorboards, long hairy tattooed arms dangling at his sides.

"Better put the knife down, kid, before you get yerself hurt."

Kyle wavered.

"Put it down!" his mother commanded. "Crystal's not hurt. She's all right."

Confused, scared, his anger turning to fear, Kyle put the knife down on the countertop. The instant he did the sailor grabbed the front of his tee shirt and yanked him up off his feet. "Gonna slice me up, huh?" He smacked Kyle across the face, hard, once, twice, three times, then threw him across the room to bang onto his cot so hard that it collapsed.

His mother got out of bed as the sailor pulled on his clothing, talking softly to him, begging him not to go.

"Come on, you can have both of us. We'll have a party."

But the sailor buttoned up his pants and left. "I don't like wise-ass kids with knives," he snarled.

When he shut the door behind him Kyle's mother staggered over to his collapsed cot and pulled him from its tangled blanket. "You little bastard!" she screeched. "You little trouble-making bastard!"

She beat him with the leather strap she kept hanging on the closet door. Because the sailor had left without paying.

Stiff and sore as he was the next morning, Kyle made his way through the cold damp wind coming off the harbor down the long blocks of row houses to school. School was a refuge for Kyle, a safe place where he could escape the reality of his hellish existence. If the teachers knew of his mother's business they never mentioned it. The kids teased him, but it was no worse than the teasing they subjected all the other kids to. Kyle took their teasing good-naturedly; he was willing to accept it, to have friends. Teasing was nothing; only kids who liked you bothered to tease you.

At school Kyle could escape. He was a good student, not the brightest in class, but he did his homework faithfully and always came to class prepared—no matter how late he had to stay up at night.

But on this day Kyle's mind was not on the classroom lessons. He knew he could not go home after school. He knew he could not face his mother or watch his sister do what his mother did. And he heard that sailor's drunken, leering, terrifying, "So maybe you wanna get fucked too, hah?"

That night he slept in a cardboard carton, part of a small mountain of discarded cartons and crates piled up by one of the dockside warehouses. It was cold and wet, the kind of chill that penetrates to the bone. But it was better than going home. He dreamed of his mother but sometimes she was Crystal but no matter who she was she was angry at him, furious, slashing at him with that leather strap and screaming wildly.

In the earliest light of morning he made his way to the nearest dock, furtive as one of the rats that dwelled in the old warehouses, and crapped into the harbor's scummy water. His stomach ached with hunger and he wondered how he could get something to eat. He washed as best as he could in a rain-filled oil barrel that he found leaning against a warehouse wall, then put his books under his arm and made his way to school.

He lived like that for nearly five weeks, sleeping in the trash piles outside the warehouses, scrounging food from other kids at school or stealing their lunch bags when hunger pressed so hard he did not care if they caught him.

His teacher, a wrinkled-faced spinster who always looked unhappy, noticed that he was losing weight, dirty-faced, coughing. But he remained quiet and obedient in class despite the increasing filthiness of his clothes.

Each night Kyle avoided the occasional shadowy figures he saw along the docks. He wanted no part of those older men, even though he saw that sometimes they lit fires and cooked food for themselves. He stayed to himself despite the steamy aromas of their cooking that made his stomach growl impatiently. And all through those weeks neither his mother nor his sister made the slightest attempt to find him. At first he had expected his mother to appear at the school, demanding that he return home. Or maybe his sister might hang around outside the school, trying to catch a glimpse of him. one evening he snuck back to the corner of the street where their flat was. He saw Crystal walking up the street toward him, her face smeared with heavy makeup. She was wearing one of her mother's dresses; it looked stupid on her, but still some guys across the street whistled at her. Kyle ran away, unable to face his own sister.

He felt guilty about that. He wanted to protect Crystal, wanted to take her away on one of the ships he saw in the harbor. But he knew that was a dream, a fantasy so far removed from him that he might as well ask her to fly to the Moon with him.

Kyle did not know it was pneumonia. He was lucky, though. The night he collapsed, body flaming with fever, one of the homeless winos eking out a living among the docks stumbled across his unconscious form and dragged him out to the front of a warehouse, where even the laziest and most obtuse night watchman would inevitably spot him.

When he woke up in the hospital Kyle had the good sense not to give his name. He did not want his mother to find him. He could not face returning home to her and Crystal. He steadfastly refused to say a word about his family or background, even to the police officers who were brought in to question him.

"They'll put you in an orphanage, kid," said one of the policeman, half-angry at Kyle's stubbornness, half-worried at the life ahead for this scrawny boy.

"You won't like the orphanage," warned the other cop. His first view of the orphanage was through the windows of a police van. Under a bleak gray winter sky the buildings looked even bleaker and grayer, like a prison. Inside, the walls were cold and bare, the floors worn smooth by generations of boys passing through.

They brought him to a small office and sat him down in front of a desk. Behind the desk sat a young woman a social worker, with a long paper form to be filled out. The first question on it was, "Name?"

"I don't remember my name," said Kyle.

The woman did not believe him. The guard standing behind him cuffed him lightly on the ear to encourage his memory. The woman frowned up at the guard.

"You have to have a name," she said to Kyle. "If you won't give us one, or can't give us one, I'll make one up for you."

That was how he came to be called Kyle Muncrief. It was the name of a handsome leading man in a soap opera that the social worker watched every afternoon.

Kyle did not like the orphanage, true enough. But it was better than home. He tolerated the half-spoiled food and intolerant staff workers who treated the boys like diseased cattle. He did not mind the gray barracks of the living quarters; his cot was actually better than the old one he had slept on at home, its scratchy army surplus blanket thicker and warmer. He survived the brutal hazings and bullying of the other guys. He made friends easily enough, but he took no part in their gangs and tribal wars. When the guards handed out physical punishment to everybody because some wiseguy did something and they could not determine who the culprit was, Kyle took his beating without saying a word.

The one thing that Kyle resisted was the attempts some of the boys made to sodomize him. "I'm straight," he insisted, even though he had never had sex with anyone. When three boys laughingly tried to pin him down he fought them until they were all bloody. The guards had to break up the battle. Kyle spent a week in solitary detention because the other three all blamed him for the fight. He took his punishment and when he came back to the barracks no one bothered him again.

There was a school that took up most of his waking hours. Gradually the other guys left him alone, knowing that he was not a partisan of any gang and that he could be trusted to keep silent about their doings. Eventually they even came to him for help with their own schoolwork or, pathetically, help with writing the letters that they hoped would spring them free of the orphanage.

He became good at writing. He learned that books allowed him to escape into different worlds and leave the orphanage far behind. Thanks to his reading and the determination of his favorite teacher he developed a vocabulary that was almost refined, compared to the other boys. His teacher made Kyle promise that he would never sound the way they did, never debase his language with their filthy four-letter words.

"If you want to get somewhere in the world out there," the man repeated endlessly to Kyle, "you should sound like a gentleman, not a gutter rat."

Every boy learned a trade at the orphanage. Kyle learned bookkeeping. In his teens he was offered an opportunity to take correspondence courses that would lead to a CPA certification. He leaped at the chance, knowing that it was a sure road to the real world outside the institution's walls.

When he was finally released from the orphanage he had an accountant's degree in his hand and a job in Baltimore arranged by the social worker who had handled his case from the very beginning. She had grown fond of Kyle over the years and predicted that of all the boys leaving the orphanage that year he would go the farthest.

He went to Canada. Six months after he began working for the accounting firm in Baltimore he received his draft notice. Even in the orphanage Kyle had watched news reports from Vietnam almost every evening. He had no intention of being killed in some senseless jungle ten thousand miles away. He fled to Toronto.