UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Dead and Their Killers Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1094031m Author Morshed, Michael Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Dead and Their Killers A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts by Michael Morshed December 2013 Thesis Committee: Professor Tod Goldberg, Co-Chairperson Professor Andrew Winer, Co-Chairperson Professor Rob Roberge The Thesis of Michael Morshed is approved: Committee Co-Chairperson Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Chapter Dr. Bill McFarland was dead on his kitchen table by afternoon, but that morning Helen Abraham sat in there with him. She had gone to him to get help with the red insect bites all over her hands. When the kettle whistled, he stood to turn the fire off. Helen thought he had looked closer at the stains on his white coffee mug than he had the spots on her hands. He filled two cups, one for him, and he set the other down in front of Helen. It hurt too much for her to pick the mug up. Dr. Bill McFarland took a sip and cringed. "Hot?" Helen smiled. "It's right off the stove." He set the mug down. "Let me see the hands again." She snapped them shut and they felt clammy. The spots embarrassed her. She extended her hands over the table, spread her fingers, and he turned her hand around. The bites, which had shown up red the night before, were now pink, and seemed to have grown a fuzz. Dr. Bill McFarland made some uninspired grunts. He released her hand. He tried the coffee again and immediately his face closed like a baseball mitt around a ball. Helen snapped her hands shut again. 1 Dr. Bill McFarland's face opened and he lowered his tongue down so its tip hit his chin. He let it cool there a moment. He made himself right. He would prescribe her medication, he explained. She scratched the red spots. "Don't do that," he said. "Should I not touch the kids?" He didn't answer. He tore a piece of paper from the pad he kept in his medicine bag and he wrote quickly on a piece of paper then held it forward. "Tell the pharmacy you want this." Helen read the messy signature, Bill McFarland printed, and a word with too many letters for her to say. "Can I touch food to make dinner?" "Yes, your womanly work can be done." That afternoon, with a white cream caked on the back of her hands, Helen lay on her partly mopped kitchen floor in respiratory arrest. The water was still on, and the mop bucket overflowed. Chapter At the county's sheriff's department, in the town of Wallace, a man in an apron painted 'Deputy Clark Saxe' in black letters on the window of an office door. 'The Sheriff' was spelled out in an arch already, across the window's top. Inside the office, the young deputy hung the phone up. He fell back into his squeaky chair and said, “Goddamn.” 2 The sheriff, sitting across from him, bent down the top corner of his newspaper. "What I tell you about saying that?" Clark put his hand on his heart and made a face like he was apologizing. "You know doctor Bill McFarland?” “I've heard all the talk about him that I would like to hear." The sheriff folded the newspaper then dropped it on the desk. “You'd be better off staying out of a man's business between him and his wife." "Wife ain't a problem anymore. McFarland is now guts and blood." Clark showed a little too much eagerness for the sheriff's liking. "Someone hacked him all up.” The sheriff tucked his top lip under the bottom. He looked at the desk drawer where he kept his flask of what he called medicine. “Who was on the phone?” “That old lady -- Sally Scott. She found him sliced up like Christmas ham.” “Christmas ham?” “Her words.” "Where?" "The doctor's house." The sheriff pushed himself up from his chair. He groaned as his caked joints bent. "She say anything else?" "Just that she ran out of there after finding him." The sheriff felt a chill freeze his breath. It was a chill he first felt on the roads leading out of Manilla. His time fighting in the Philippines was filled with pretty nasty things. On 3 the boat ride back home, he decided he just wanted to come home to nice plain things. And that's what Wallace was. A nice plain thing. He was the only military man of age in the town, so he got elected sheriff, years back, and he'd made it his duty from day one to keep the town just what it was the day he'd arrived -- nice and plain. A place where people die old in soft clean beds from quiet killers. "All right," he said. He pulled the old brown sack coat from the back of his chair. He walked in front of the small, square mirror that hung on the office wall. His mother had taught him never go out without looking yourself over. People judge. He fixed his shirt collar. His face had swelled with age and his eyes now were like two shriveled green peas. His skin seemed to be getting thicker and he didn't know if it was from getting old, or if the liquor was somehow coagulating. From his inner coat pocket, he drew a silver comb and went over his long hair, which was the same shiny silver. “That so-called old lady, Sally Scott, she used to put a hell of a spark in a man’s groin.” “That old bag?” “I know. Never would believe it today. The goiter.” He set a worn fedora on his head then dropped the comb back into his pocket. “Bring your handkerchief.” "Got it." Clark was ready at the door. The sheriff got to beside the door-side corner of his desk and he grabbed onto the desk's last edge. Clark asked, "Forget something?" 4 The sheriff had kept himself to no drinking for a month save three days. His wife had caught sight of the blood on his hand after a fit of coughing, and she'd put the order down. It was an all right month save three days. It didn't have quite the amount of laughing he'd have liked, and there were those moments when he would look off and what he saw with a sober mind wasn't quite as nice as what he could see with a drink or two in him. He'd been told that if you're going to get sober, you better get religious too, gotta have something, so he'd picked out his Bible and had been thumbing through the passages. This was murder though. Sobriety and religion made his eye see the world in clear pictures. Sliced like a Christmas ham? He worried without proper medication the bodies he'd seen bust and fall in San Miguel would rise again. His professionalism, in the eyes of the people of Wallace, his leadership with Clark, would be compromised. He needed bravery. He needed a shield. He'd seen hellish things sober. He didn't know if he'd seen hellish things drunk, and that's what he wanted, not to remember. He went back and pulled open that desk drawer. He slipped his flask into the coat’s side pocket. "All right," he said then wiped his nose. “Let's get to that murder." "You're calling it already?" The sheriff's eyes grew as wide as they could go. "Chopped himself into Christmas ham? Boy, get out the door." 5 Chapter Deputy Clark drove the sheriff through the town center in a Model T the department had bought used from Boston police. It was the fastest thing either one of them had ever been on. Clark had only gone as fast as a horse, but he'd gotten good at driving the car. They drove around the town center's circles, passing its colonial houses, the brick schoolhouse with the bell tower on top, and by a man who crossed the street holding a brown bag. His two boys ran behind him and it looked like they'd just come out of the town's store, Milly's. They ran around the man on either side, jumped the fence that circled the town green, then plopped into the grass next to the old wooden stage, where the mayor had given his Armistice Day speech, a week before. Clark brought the car close to the carriage and two horses in front of them, and the driver showed his head. The sheriff pointed forward and to the left. Clark honked twice then swung the car onto the other side of the road. The sheriff tipped his hat as they passed. They turned onto Highway 1, which was still dirt. Clark drove slowly. “They ever gonna pave this road?” “State ought to.” “Want me to drive faster?” “Save the vehicle. McFarland's already dead.” The car rattled over the bumps in the road the whole way down the highway. They reached the municipal cemetery, on the town center’s limit. The sheriff could never pass 6 the place without picturing dead bodies shrinking while the grass grew.