Jake Needham - Laundry Man

It was early afternoon and the dazzling shimmer of the sunlight on the river just beyond the windows made the table where I sat seem like a good place to think about what Bar had said and let some time pass. I ordered another Heineken and watched the river. The beer was rich and thick and time and possibilities swirled around me as if my thoughts were no more than pieces of flotsam floating on the river’s currents.

Then they passed, and they were gone.

There were a lot of things I could have done with the rest of my Sunday afternoon. I could have gone to my office and prepared my lectures for next week’s classes. I could have headed over to Lumpini Park and pounded around the lake until I sweated out the sense of foreboding rising within me. I could have retreated to my apartment, locked the door, and gone back to bed. That’s probably what I should have done.

Instead, I drove out to Dollar’s house. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to see Dollar, but he and I were going to have a serious conversation pretty soon-that seemed absolutely inevitable-and I figured there was nothing to be gained by putting it off. I could have called first to see if he was at home, but of course I didn’t. The trip might turn out to be a waste, but I figured I would take that risk. Catching Dollar by surprise would make for a far more compelling conversation than letting him know in advance that I was coming.

Dollar lived on the river north of the city, not far from the international school where a lot of the city’s foreign residents and a few wealthy Thais with pretensions sent their children. I had been there four or five times for parties but had never actually been inside the house. Dollar’s parties always took place on the lawn, a sprawling, close-cropped expanse of grass impenetrably walled with towering banyan trees and rolling as smoothly as a putting green down a gentle slope to the Chao Praya River.

On party nights the lawn was bathed in white light from powerful floods tucked discreetly in the trees and a string quartet from some university was usually out there floating Mozart and Bach off on the heavy night air. Dollar’s smartly-dressed guests generally represented more nationalities than I could name and, as they wandered among linen-draped tables engaging in pleasantly ambiguous conversation, they generally made certain that they were noticed by everyone else who was there. The first time I had gone to one of Dollar’s parties, I remembered standing quietly at the top of the slope and looking down across the lawn for a long time. The illumination was so white, so flat and colorless, and the people and the table settings looked so faultless, so perfectly formed, the whole scene made me think of a tiny diorama atop a really expensive wedding cake.

Dollar’s house was a rambling two-story affair of no particular style, but it was large and comfortable looking, the kind of a place in which you had no difficulty imagining a man living. The story around town was that Dollar had been married three times-once to a Japanese woman, once to a Chinese, and once to an Indonesian-and each woman had in turn left him. Dollar had no children, none that anyone had heard about anyway, and as far as I knew he lived alone except for the Thai couple that cooked and cleaned for him.

I pulled the Volvo to the side of the road and parked close to the high concrete wall that pinned Dollar’s house against the river. You couldn’t see the house from the street because there was only one opening in the wall, a black metal drive gate that slid open like a huge peephole. Set into the larger gate was a door for any callers who had the misfortune to be on foot.

I’m not certain exactly how long I sat there looking at the gate and doing nothing else. I kept asking myself if I really wanted to do this. I didn’t, but I was going to do it anyway. I got out of the car and pressed the intercom button quickly before I had a chance to change my mind.

While I was waiting for someone to answer, I reached down and rested my hand on the handle of the little door within the drive gate. As I touched it the door drifted open, propelled by nothing more than the weight of my hand. The motion was so smooth and silent that it was a little eerie, but I pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped inside.

The front of Dollar’s house was a solid wash of white stucco without a single window or opening other than a big pair of dark teak doors that Dollar swore he had personally taken from a Khmer temple near Angkor Wat. Naturally I had never believed that for a moment and I doubted anyone else had either. I knew that the other side of the house, the side that faced the river, was exactly the opposite in style. It was an unbroken curtain of glass that opened the whole house to a sweeping view of the Chao Praya River with its constant traffic of longtails, rice barges, tourist boats, ferries, and ambiguous vessels whose real tasks you hesitated to guess.

I started up the walkway to the front, but finding the door in the gate open and seeing no sign of life made the whole scene feel a little spooky. On impulse I angled off across the grass and circled around to the back. It wouldn’t hurt to have a quick look around before I just blundered up and rang the bell.

As I rounded the northeast corner of the house, Dollar’s spectacular view of the river captured me just as it always did. For a moment I stood absolutely still and watched a long train of teak rice barges, tethered nose to tail like a column of elderly circus elephants, wallow noiselessly downriver toward the Gulf of Thailand. So peaceful was the sight that when I finally turned back toward Dollar’s house and glanced inside through the glass curtain wall it took several moments for me to register what I was looking at.

The living room was in shambles. It looked like a bulldozer had run through it from one end to the other. Lamps were broken, chairs overturned, tables smashed, and every book pulled from the long shelves flanking the fireplace and dumped into piles on the floor. Two once-plush couches lay on their backs with their bases toward the windows. The rich blue of their silk upholstery had been sliced into ribbons as if some maniac had attacked them with a broadsword.

I stood and stared, rooted to the spot by the appalling yet still mesmerizing magnitude of the destruction.

“Looks like a real messy burglary, doesn’t it?”

Startled, I jerked my heard toward the sound of the voice and was confounded to see Bar Phillips standing with his arms folded across his chest looking into Dollar’s house alongside me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

Bar’s eyes searched around as if he might find the answer inscribed on the sky.

“I figured you might be coming out to see Dollar,” he finally said.

“What’s that got to do with you?”

He lifted his arms and let them flop back to his sides in a gesture that combined bewilderment with exasperation. “Well… I thought maybe someone ought to watch your back.”

“The hell you did. You’re a reporter and you smelled a story.”

Bar made a face at that and fished his pipe out of his shirt pocket.

“You flatter me, boy. All I write anymore is a load of shit. Nobody’s thought of me as a real reporter in thirty years.”

“Then why the sudden concern about my welfare? If you thought I was walking into trouble, you could have just told me back at the Marriott. You didn’t have to follow me all the way out here.”

Bar stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth and chewed on it without any indication that he planned to light it anytime soon.

“I always do what I can for my friends. But I only do what I can, not what I can’t.”

I took a long breath and let it out slowly. “Does that mean anything?”