chapter seven

And there he was now walking the streets of Bankok, looking for flower vendors that may steer him in the proper direction. To say that the streets were littered with flowers would be an ironic, but apt statement. To say that flowers ‘littered’ the streets would be to assume that they took the place of trash on the streets and this would be so, but it would be an ironic picture. Garlands, bouquets, single stemmed and bunches of flowers from pinks to yellows, it was an overwhelmingly gaudy and powerfully sensuous sight. Mixing in with the scents of perfumes were the fish and the body odor and wildly running boys and girls who also perfumed the streets. It was a powerful absolution of infinites, Orville mused.
Vendors called to him, the only occidental walking this street at this hour when the heat seemed to be ready able and willing to pick you up off your feet and throw you into the air and into the nearest bar for a cool beer. “Here, here, here!” they called, “Mr. tourist!” and yet, he walked on, repulsed and delighted simultaneously with the mingling cross-currents of rot and life, dirt and colours.
From out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a child, a tall child though, walking from out of the red rosed depths of an alleyway. Like a strange topiary salesman, he appeared from between a mass of red roses and Texas bluebells seeming to part them with the slightest shrugging of his shoulders, it is seamless and that makes Orville take notice. Orville Newton Leone knows that he is a tall man and that tall people, men and women alike are usually not the coolest of cats and nowhere nearly as smooth and lithe as their namesakes. But he knows this also. He knows that God or someone some good, benevolent or indifferent force or being even taller than himself has graced him with the poise and dexterity that it takes for him to say.... oh, have walked along the highrise ledge overlooking a Detroit skyline and slip into the twenty- third floor of the Highmoon Hotel and strangled an astigmatitic biker gang leader with a purple sash of the silk curtain pull before he could even turn around from investigating the newly opened window in his room that hadn’t been opened a moment ago when he checked in ready to begin his ascension as the chaotic leader of the union of the motor city sanitation union breakers. Orville Newton Leone knows this and knows that he can jump like a cat and swim like a fish and fly like a bee, if only for a few moments at a time. But, Orville is now only thinking of the boy with a twelve o clock shadow across his cheeks who is following him through the markets and ducking behind the wicker baskets of tulips as soon as ONL gives the slightest glance back over his sholder, the faint whiff of Brut 33 seeming out of place in that market of so many good scents.