By John McMahon

It was bound to come to this, or if it not exactly this something like it. A sudden eruption of tumultuous violence followed by the destruction of valuable property and ending in a meaningless death.
It was inevitable, not because it was fated or predetermined by an all powerful force. It was inevitable because my neighbors are the Thai version of white trash. White trash isn’t always white, isn’t always southern, isn’t always poor. It’s a class, a tribe, a special sect of people who revile work over all conditions. Who live by a violent code and would rather loll against a tree drinking rot gut whiskey out of a jug then almost anything else.
Nelson Algren knew white trash in his blood and his red neck patriarch, preacher Linkhorn, declared the white trash creed in Walk on the wild side when he answered the question about his inability to stay employed with, ‘I aint playin’ the whore to no man.’ This kind of dumb pride is the back bone of the clans thinking. As important as inter-generational bottle fights, teenage pregnancy or badly rendered tattoos, the idea that respect, or lack of, should motivate all behavior
My neighbors; I don’t know exactly what the family structure is. The window above my desk looks out through a couple of hundred feet of scrub jungle onto their concrete block shack. For five to eight hours a day I bear witness to their bickering, clambering, laughing and general non sense. At any time, day or night, bodies are strewn about sleeping, in and out of the house. The television is always on at top volume. Children aged from infant to belligerent teen roam aimlessly in and out of the place. Motorbikes in various states of destruction lean against walls and trees, parts scattered across the pitted dirt yard into the high weeds and encroaching jungle that separate us.
A pack of half feral dogs also claim the shack as their territory, hidden during the day in nooks and crevices of shadow, they roam from evening till dawn baying and screeching. Their screams when fighting are like the cries of terrified children filling the night. I spend more hours lying in bed contemplating different methods of dog slaughter than sleeping.
The police come around two or three times a week picking up and returning people. Money lenders come for their pay offs so often I wonder about their profit to fuel consumption ratio.
When I came to live opposite them I thought I would go mad listening to their wails and yelling through the screen of vegetation. Like all members of their clan my neighbors cannot talk, they scream, shout, bellow and caterwaul. Entire conversations are held at the distance of a hundred feet: from the shade of a tree to the worn hammock tailored from an old rice sack strung between chipped and cracked concrete pillars.
The sole wage earner of the family works at the factory ten kilometers to the north. He comes and goes as regular as any shift worker in the midst of the house’s environment of chaos. I know where he works because he wears the bright blue coveralls, white hair net and face mask that all of the employees of the mysterious plant wear. What they do in there, what they separate, or emulsify, bisque or strain I have no idea. What I know is that besides whatever the rest of the family picks up in petty theft, day work, prostitution and gambling the two hundred dollars a month he earns keeps the entire rabble in rice and fish sauce.
I have learned to mark the month’s beginnings by the cries of desperation bellowed by some woman on the first, pay day. Like white trash the world over the women at the shack are big; thick arms and legs support a wide carriage while the men are small, sinewy, jackal like.
The worker arrives home staggering drunk three or four hours after the dinner hour having spent a large percent of his month’s wages drinking rice liquor and playing cards at a considerable loss. The wife or whoever the dominant female of the family is berates him at the threshold of the house while the rest of the family nips and snips and points fingers accusingly. Fights break out among the different factions; several times members have been taken to hospital from knife wounds, bottle gashes, or a wok bashing. Normally the violence is lamented with wailing and crying for a few more hours until everyone is exhausted or too drunk to continue and they collapse around the shack and its extensions to sleep.
On these nights I like to sit out on the porch with a glass of whiskey and listen to the theatrics. It reminds me of when I lived in the Polish section of Brooklyn and could sit in the back yard and listen to the drunken immigrant laborers beat their wives on a hot summer’s night.
But this month it all went wrong from the beginning. I rarely know the exact date; it’s one of the small privileges of being an unemployed ex-pat, to be oblivious of the calendar. But this month I was aware of the change due to some banking issues and was looking forward to the evening’s melee. I stopped at the liquor store and bought a bottle of Jim Bean, a rare extravagance made possible by a little extra cash I stumbled on.
I was sitting at my desk staring blankly at the same screen these words appear on when I heard the tell tale gunshot rattle of the employed neighbors old motorbike. It wasn’t even dark yet. I checked the date on the lower left hand of my monitor, I hadn’t made a mistake it was the first.
I could see the family was as confused as I because in a short time the entire populace of the shack were standing in the shade of the poor awning that hung from the front. The conversation came over the distance in scattered glass cracking tones that meant nothing to me, but I watched the pantomime of the figures just the same. The blue suited worker held the motley groups attention as he gesticulated intensely. He jostled around swinging his arms in front of him as he spoke; in his suit and mask he looked like a fencer warming up for competition. Even from the distance where I sat, through bright green jungle and a pane of tinted glass I could see an awed silence had fallen over the listeners.
I was intrigued to the point that I picked up my machete and walked into the growth of trees towards the shack, pretending to look for mangoes. Now I could hear the man speaking but still it was unintelligible to me, too fast, too far away for my limited understanding of the language. He stopped talking made a grand gesture with his arms pointed to the sky and then bringing them down in a flip with his last words he began laughing, looking expectantly from one blank face to the next.
While the entire family stood looking at him with that tight lipped grin that Thais use as an expression of confusion and sometimes fear a large white delivery van slowed then stopped on the road before the shack. The van was from the international big box store in town. It’s where the expats and well to do Thais shop for groceries but it’s also a place of pilgrimage for the poor.
On weekends the place is crowded with families from the outlying parts of the province who come packed twelve and fifteen in the bed of pick-ups to stroll around the air conditioned super store examining all of the plastic wrapped food and electronic gee-gaws and digital marvels. They bring rice mats and stacked bamboo containers of food to picnic in the lesser aisles, napping in clusters when the finished. The store in turn preys on these people with impossibly low down payments and shyster style interest plans on over priced low quality Chinese made electronics and appliances.
I thought the plant employee must have stepped into this same trap. Suckered in, sweet talked, blinded by the flash of chrome and possibly the cleavage of a scantily clad sales girl. I was ready for a big screen TV he couldn’t afford to power, or a new refrigerator with ice maker and cold water tap that would sit empty in deference to monthly payments.
I wasn’t prepared for what the two boys from the shop unloaded from the truck but I recognized it instantly, though it was still folded and shrink wrapped in gray green film.
My god I thought, what could this mean? I knew exactly what it was because I had eyed the same thing on my last shopping trip. It was a regulation ping pong table with net, paddles, balls and little folding chairs for spectators. It had screw out levelers on the legs. There was a laser eye that could be used to true the net. The top was a chalky blue color lined in white and the balls florescent orange. I had admired it myself, but then what the hell would I do with it, I live alone, have no friends, can’t play ping-pong, so I went on my way.
The thing was unloaded onto the dusty, pie-bald yard of the shack looking like a gigantic insect in its translucent cocoon. Its metallic legs bent, it wings folded. The family remained silent while the boys finished up their paper work. They wouldn’t lose face in front of the delivery men. The plant employee ran his hands over the angles of stretch film, caressing the plastic wrap shell.
When the truck had moved off the family started to circle the table in single file, slowly, from a distance. They moved around it as if it were an object of religious significance. The plant employee turned to the ring of his family shouting in glee grabbing hands full of air in celebration, and then ran off into the shack.
How the ping pong table had beguiled the plant employee I will never know but the desire must have been strong since it would have cost more than he earned in that dangerous place in a month. Whatever conscience the man possessed had succumbed to the pull of this object, this table tennis table.
None of the family had touched it yet. They kept a reverential distance until the plant employee still in his blue coveralls returned with a big blade knife and began to rip into the plastic wrap. He cut through the layers still jabbering, turning his head in an arc addressing individuals and laughing out right as he pulled at the tough strings of film.
I moved slowly back to my own porch. I was entranced by the situation, but weary of the extended families silence. It was the longest period of quite since I had moved into the opposite house months before. It was bound to be a bad sign.
Finally the table was stripped of its protective covering. The leaves fell level with each other and the net stretched over the median. The package of paddles and balls was torn open, its trappings fanned out across the surface for all to examine.
I guess it was the wife; it was the dominant female whose job it was on normal months to berate the drunken plant worker who first stepped to the playing surface. She handled the balls, dropping them in turn against the top; they made a sharp distinct clicking sound. She examined a paddle, turning it over, running her fingers across the rubberized, pebble dash surface. The plant employee took another, demonstrating how it was to be held and swung. She watched him move the paddle through the air three times before delivering a back hand swing of her own to the side of his head.
The one shot broke the spell the family had stood in and in mass; from adolescent to senior citizen they collapsed upon the plant employee and the table itself, using one to beat the other.
It was an attack so savage, so bereft of compassion that they seemed transformed. It was no different than watching a community of chimpanzees attacking one of their own gone bad for the betterment of the species.
The plant employee had been driven through one panel of the table then stomped to the ground by the children while the adults ripped the folding legs from their mechanisms. Shooing the children back they used these to pummel the already broken, bleeding factory worker, sharp pieces of metal gauging his face with each swing.
From the core beating several smaller skirmishes erupted. Some lasted only a single blow, others tumbled on unheeded by the majority of the family. The table was bashed to pieces; and each piece was used to batter the plant employee further until both were beyond repair.
The dogs had woken from their afternoon slumber by the violence and boiled out from under cast off cardboard boxes, from beneath the skeletal remains of a pickup perpetually parked to the side of the shack, from burrows dug around the house foundation to growl, yelp and fight amongst themselves. Not willing to single out any one human to attack they ganged up on the smallest of their own kind and savaged the runt. The people paid them no attention as they shouted at, gouged, punched and tackled one another in an effort to beat the plant employee further.
I don’t know where it would have ended if one of the oldest of the family, a rail thin man who appeared to be on the elderly side of seventy, marked with faded blue tattoos across his torso hadn’t collapsed with the effort of flailing the workers back with the vinyl net and its securing hard ware.
A panic ran through the group returning them to a state of sanity when the old man hit the ground. Somebody called the local ambulance, a pickup truck with an enclosed bed and a siren. Women ran into the house for wet towels. The males lit cigarettes and squatted down near the body.
While the family was distracted by the old man the plant employee crawled away into the jungle. The remnants of the table: broken and warped pieces of blue composite board, rusted and bent chrome legs, flattened orange spots that were once balls are scattered at the edges of their property even today.

The funeral for the old man began two days later. His body had already been incinerated at the temple but now his spirit had to be appeased and his family had a lot to atone for. It started at 4 A.M. a wall of noise bursting the silence of darkest morning. The dogs and cocks followed, complaining about the untimely disruption. I rolled from bed full knowing what the sudden, painful world of noise was about but no less angry. Ten minutes later a steady procession of rattling motorcycles, headlights bobbing in the black cool air, piled with families of four flocked to the house.
The funeral would last for ten days, ten days of almost constant deafening noise. There was no bearing it, I would have to move out to a hotel in town, I sat staring through the darkness at the outline of the concrete shack lit by vertical florescent bars that edged the road just in front of the shack to guide mourners to the party.
I stumbled around my house with plugs of silicone shaped like nipples shoved in my ears, making tea, showering, cutting a piece of three day old bread, a deep bass reverberated through my body from the huge sound system that would drape the surrounding area in a bone shaking rhythm for nearly two weeks waiting for daylight.
I packed a bag and got ready to leave for the mourning period, but with the weak light of early day the music cut off and monks who would chant morning and night for the length of the funeral started their droning. I was struck with the obligation to see the tragedy through. As a witness surely I had some part to play in atoning the old man’s death.
I walked the short distance through the scrub jungle and mango trees that separated our homes. The huge wall of old speakers blocked my view until I was just outside the shack. The burnt lawn was covered with folding tables and lines of red plastic chairs which glowed in the hazy light. There were around twenty men squatting in front of the old man’s photo, passing a bowl with a few tangled notes inside. I hadn’t expected this show of reverence for the family. Not least from the men of the village, there were even a few cops there. Women had been around for the previous two days preparing food as would be expected.
There must have been something to the old man to bring this amount of people so early in the morning. I joined the group, scraping a few bills from my pocket to add to the heap in front of the old man’s photo thinking I might have gotten these people wrong. Maybe there was nothing exceptional about their behavior. Maybe they were just normal citizens and I was the one askew.
I left around the back side of the house so as not to pass in front of the mourners while they paid respect and there found the card game that looked to have been going all night. Men sat around two folding tables pushed together, drinking from glasses of white rice liquor. A cloud of anger hung over the game, cards were smacked against the tables with a flourish of desperation by thin grinning men, except for the factory worker who was propped up at one end, encased in plaster and bandages. His face swollen black criss-crossed by treads of blue stitching, he had a huge pile of bills, coins and even a gold watch heaped in front of him. Grinning painfully, it looked as if he were finally winning.