Tropico?' It's an old western and Clem Snide is a fabled shootist. The bar is full of black powder smoke, the smell of entrails, blood and chili. The walls and roof fall in.
A sweet dry wind rises from the southeast. Audrey with some last-minute purchases. Almost the same buckboard it is already take care of Meester once he gets up beside the boy and they start off down the road where the flint chips glitter in the sun. Ahead they see mountains shrouded in mist, the orange and purple sky glowing behind.
He must have dozed off while he was walking—it's known as the Walkies—you get it from space travel. You can walk and talk and get yourself around while you are sound asleep, living in a dream. The dream is made of your actual surroundings—so you don't bump into things. You just see them differently.
A ragged street urchin falls in beside him for a fraction of a second. He glances sideways and knows it is one of the miniature youths, strong and quick as little cats.
The boy flashes ahead leading the way through mirrors and walls, through shops and urinals that open into squares where street acts are in progress: minstrels, Gnaoua drums, lutes, horns, zithers, tumblers, fire eaters, jugglers, snake charmers—all blurring together.
Audrey is walking very fast to keep up with the youth's 'sorcerer's gait,' past a platform where several boys are doing animal copulation acts as they impersonate cats, foxes, lemurs, and horses, snorting, whinnying, growling, whimpering. The spectators roll in the street pissing with laughter.
Audrey is struck by the variety of garb and racial types that flash by like scenes glimpsed from a train window: Mongols with felt boots, eighteenth-century dandies in silk pumps and breeches, pirates with cutlasses and patches, medieval jerkins and codpieces, sharp smell of weeds from old westerns, boots and holsters, djellabas, togas, sarongs, and youths clad in a transparent fabric like flexible glass lounge about in the studied postures he had noticed in the mall—obviously there to be seen ... superb Nubians naked except for leopardskin capes and boots of hippopotamus hide ... boys in tight rubber suits with smooth poreless faces like green-white glazed terra-cotta.
'Frog boys from underground rivers ...' the guide throws over his shoulder.
Audrey notices that his guide and most of the other people he passes carry at their belts a tool like a little crowbar hooked at one end. Now a ripple passes along the street, actors and musicians are gathering up instruments and props behind them as the word moves from lip to lip.
'HIP.' (Heroid Patrol)
People are dodging into doorways, prising up manhole covers with their tools, and scrambling down ladders into a maze of tunnels where the Heroids do not dare to venture. Audrey follows his guide through twisting tunnels, past youths on roller skates, scooters, and skateboards.
The tunnels open here and there into caverns where people live in stalactite-and-quartz houses and tend pools of blind fish. Up twisting iron ladders are Turkish baths, lodgings, houses and brothels. Privies open into restaurants and patios.
Down a rope ladder is a dusty gymnasium where boys are practicing with various weapons as they wait for an assignment: Jerry and Rubble Blood Pu, Cupid Mount Etna, Dahlfar, Jimmy Lee, and the Katzenjammer Kids, as we call the German boys. They drift over to greet him.
'How'd you make out with the Eyetie?'
'Easy and greasy and lots of fun ... the look on his lousy wise-guy face when he
Audrey sees a number of the little people climbing up and down ropes and swinging from rings with great agility. He is amazed to see that some of them have long prehensile tails and retractable claws on their feet and hands that enable them to scramble up trees like squirrels.
As he watches, one boy drops thirty feet to the floor, lighting like a cat. The other boys are constantly trying to touch the little people but they are skittish of contact, dodging away from outstretched hands or snapping with their sharp little teeth.
All of them are expert
