Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “It doesn’t have to be a girlfriend,” said John Smith. “That was just an example. It could be a—”

  “Look, John, so anything can happen. What does that tell you? Exactly nothing. You got to start with what’s likely to happen and go from there. Listen, this has been a pretty good night! This is the first time we’ve made any contact with the guy. Now we know what he actually looks like.”

  “I still don’t know how you did that,” said John Smith.

  “I swear, it was that black shirt he wears open down the front. He was wearing the same shirt in that picture we got from the Miami-Dade County cops. He’s just spent five or six hours doing whatever the hell he likes to do in a whole building full of whores. I don’t see him driving all the way back to Wynwood at three in the morning. Let’s see where he does go.”

  John Smith sank back in the passenger seat and let out a sigh and closed his eyes.

  About half an hour later, a heavyset guy in a black shirt open down the front, displaying the vast terrain of his hairy chest, came out of the Honey Pot by himself. Nestor nudged John Smith in the ribs and said, “Well—there’s our boy.”

  John Smith sat low in the seat and eyed Igor Drukovich. “Jesus! He doesn’t look very steady on his feet to me.”

  The man headed into the Honey Pot’s parking lot. With the lights off, Nestor started up the Camaro.

  No more than a minute had gone by when John Smith’s conspiracy-muffled voice said, “What’s he doing? Suppose he just walks through the lot and out the other side?”

  John Smith stared at the exit from the parking lot and more minutes crawled by.

  Finally, a Volvo, the big one, the Vulcan, emerged from the lot. Nestor had to look twice to see the hairy chest driving it.

  Nestor took his cool sweet time folding up the reflector screen… all the while saying, “You wanna know my idea of the worst possible way—”

  John Smith, bewildered: “He’s speeding up!”

  “—to die? Getting run over by a Volvo Vulcan or a Cadillac Escalade. Why I don’t—”

  “—Jesus!—he’s almost reached that bend in the road and we haven’t even—”

  “—know except it would be so humiliating. I know that much.”

  “Nestor!”

  “Cool it. I gotta let him go around the bend before I turn on the lights and start tailing him. Otherwise he’s gonna wonder why he leaves the lot and some car’s lights come on and start following him.”

  “But he’s gonna disappear.”

  “Yeah, for about five seconds. There—he’s just gone around it. Watch this.”

  Nestor turned on the Camaro’s lights and drove it onto the road slowly… then shot past the Honey Pot with a good show-off burst of Camaro acceleration and reached the bend in the road in a heartbeat… slowed down going around it… and sure enough, about 150 feet ahead there was the Volvo Vulcan… The body seemed to recede in the dark… but there was no mistaking the taillights. They were huge and rose up two feet higher than any ordinary vehicle’s and wrapped around the corners in extravagant bands of light. Nestor was able to hang back this far and still keep track of it. Igor and the Vulcan were heading east… but only for half a mile… Igor turned left and headed north on A1A, the little highway that ran right along the coast. There was a fair amount of traffic, and Nestor was able to tail Igor more closely without being noticed. The green highway signs seemed to be drifting toward him. At first he was familiar with the places he was passing… Miami Gardens Drive… Northeast 192nd Street… Northeast 203rd Street… Aventura… Golden Beach… the GulfStream Park racetrack… They passed a big Russian restaurant called Tatyana’s… and then Igor and the Vulcan swung left along a wide boulevard… more Russian names began turning up in the midnight gloaming… the Kirova Ballet Academy… the St. Petersburg Turkish and Russian Baths… the Ouspensky Cultural Center, which looked like just another storefront… Vladim’s Paint and Body… Ivana’s Nails and Spa. Igor kept on heading west heading west. Where the hell was he going?

  What they were passing now made Nestor feel like they were heading into another country. Here in the middle of the night there was something alien and ghostly about the roadsides, which were barely visible in a deep, unstable dusk created by passing headlights and highway lamps on metal stanchions so high their illumination was feeble… Every place except the 7-Eleven was dark, it seemed—Speeder Oil Change and Tuneup… Pet Pleasers Salon… IHOP, namely, the International House of Pancakes… Four Guys’ Paint and Body… Spanky’s Cheese Steak Factory… Tara Estates Manses for Active Adults… Supercuts… Smokey Bones BBQ and Grill… Pet Supermarket… Little Caesars Pizza… Applebee’s… Wendy’s… Desoto Luke’s Active Adults, which seemed to consist of a pair of plain brick apartment houses with little terraces and courtyards… another 7-Eleven, lit up… Carver Toyota, with a lot full of automobiles twilit by two overhead lights… Olde Towne Bingo…

  “Where are we?” said John Smith.

  “Broward County,” said Nestor, “but I don’t know exactly where. I’ve never been this far west up here before.”

  “This is really strange!” said John Smith, an unusually animated John Smith. “And you know why? We’ve just entered a strange land… called America! We’re not in Miami anymore. Can’t you feel it? Some Russian named Igor is leading us into the USA!”

  Nestor analyzed this concept for traces of anti-Cuban insult, even though he had experienced the same alien feeling just a moment before… Well, John Smith was an alien himself. He was apparently a living embodiment of a creature everybody had heard of but nobody ever met in Miami, the WASP, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Rationally, Nestor knew John Smith’s crack about “a strange land… the USA” was harmless. Emotionally, he still resented it, harmless or not.

  West west and farther west Igor kept going in his hulk with the lurid taillights. More low brick apartment buildings drifted by… “The Hampton Court… Active Adults Assisted Living Suites”…

  “ ‘Active Adults Assisted Living,’ ” said John Smith. “Come on, you gotta love it!” He turned to get Nestor’s reaction.

  Nestor went to some pains not to show any reaction at all. He couldn’t exactly think it through in words. Animated like this, John Smith annoyed him. The animation always came out of some feeling of superiority. John Smith could draw… concepts… out of something as ordinary as this second-rate road… “We’ve just entered a strange land… the USA.”… That kind of thinking was a facility Nestor didn’t have. Irony came always at somebody else’s expense… his own, probably… Did it all come down to education? John Smith had gone to a college with an intimidating name… Yale… At that moment Nestor felt a hatred for everybody who had ever been to a college with an intimidating name… They were all pussies, when you got right down to it… but then what bothered Nestor was that maybe they weren’t pussies…

  West west west Igor drove the Vulcan until he reached someplace called West Park, when he turned right and headed due north up a smaller road… past Utopia… past the Deauville Abbey… more low-slung brick apartment buildings… “Active Adult Retirement Leisure Assisted Living Hospice and Coda Chateau”…

  “These places—they’re everywhere around here,” Nestor muttered.

  “It spooks you out after a while,” said John Smith.

  Now Igor turns left and heads farther west.

  “Where the hell’s he going?” said Nestor. “To the Everglades?”

  Under the Florida’s Turnpike toll road went Igor and his Volvo Vulcan, still heading west… but soon he slowed down and turned into some sort of driveway. Nestor and John Smith knew what he was heading for even before they could see the buildings themselves… Even from fifty yards away they could see the inevitable man-made lake… the Camaro’s headlights were just bright enough for them to make out the fountains geysering up in the middle of the water.

  Nestor barely slowed down and drove right on by the place.

  “What are you doing?” sai
d John Smith.

  “I don’t want to come in right behind him,” said Nestor. “I’m gonna make a U-turn and come into the place from the other direction.”

  It took no more than a glimpse to see that here was your stone basic Active Adult housing. A metal plaque on a stanchion by the driveway bore the name Alhambra Lakes. On one side the entryway opened up onto a big parking lot… packed with cars… dimly lit by a few lamps on tall stanchions. Igor’s Vulcan had just entered it. The apartment buildings were the most basic they had seen so far. At a glance they looked like two grim solid cubes of brick… each three stories high… adorned only by the inevitable tiny balconies and the sliding glass doors… no shrubbery or any other horticultural or arboricultural decoration, not even a hopeful palm tree or two.

  “What do you suppose this is all about?” said John Smith… with a nod back toward Alhambra Lakes.

  “I’m gonna drive in there,” said Nestor. He pulled over onto the shoulder of the road… then made a U-turn… gunned the Camaro so suddenly, it threw John Smith’s head back… but almost immediately had to slow down to turn into the Active Adults’ driveway… and there was the Volvo Vulcan, nosed into a parking slot. The taillights were off, but the lights were on in its interior.

  “I’m gonna drive by,” said Nestor, “but don’t look at him. Don’t even look in his direction. I’m gonna go slow, like we’re trying to find someplace to park.”

  Before they reached the Vulcan… there was the burly figure, Igor, opening the Vulcan’s big rear door.

  “Don’t look,” said Nestor. “Or maybe turn your head a little bit in the other direction.”

  Which they did. Nestor didn’t even try to look with peripheral vision. When they reached the end of the row of cars, they were very close to the nearest building, and he was able to see through a wide, open entrance, which looked like a sort of tunnel. At the other end, toward the interior, more miserable overhead lighting.

  “Must be a courtyard,” said John Smith.

  Nestor made a U-turn and drove slowly down the other side of the row. When they reached the front of the Volvo Vulcan, the interior lights were off.

  “He’s walking toward the building,” said John Smith.

  “What the hell’s that he’s carrying?” said Nestor. “That big flat thing.”

  “I don’t know,” said John Smith. “Looks like a portfolio. You know, an artist’s portfolio.”

  “I’m gonna turn around again there at the end. See if you can tell where he’s going.”

  Nestor made the turn very slowly and headed back up the other side.

  “There he is,” said John Smith. “He’s going into that entrance, the one we just went by.”

  Nestor got just the barest glimpse of Igor as he disappeared into the tunnel or whatever it was called. He stopped the Camaro right there in the middle of the parking lot.

  “Whattaya think he’s doing here?” said Nestor. “You realize we’re practically in Fort Lauderdale… and we’re hell west of nowhere? I don’t get it. And you say he’s got a studio in Wynwood?”

  “It’s not just a studio, Nestor, it’s a whole apartment, and it’s pretty nice. I know plenty of artists, successful ones, too, who would die to have a setup like that.”

  “I do… not… get… this,” said Nestor.

  “Well… what do we do now?”

  “There’s not much we can do right now,” said Nestor. “It’s past four a.m. We can’t just go wandering around the place in the middle of the night.”

  The Camaro’s headlights were still on the building… Silence… Then John Smith said, “We’ll have to come back in the morning and wait until he leaves and then see what we can do…”

  Silence… the Camaro’s headlights aimlessly illuminated part of a row of cars… the lot was packed… The Camaro was almost ten years old, and Nestor thought about how now, when the engine idled, he was aware of the chassis vibrating.

  “It’s already early in the morning,” said Nestor. “A guy like Igor—I don’t see him going out to a strip club and getting drunk until three in the morning and then getting up at six. You saw all that shit he unloaded from the Vulcan. He wasn’t just dropping by for a visit.”

  “Ummmm… I guess you’re right,” said John Smith. “Besides, we’ve got to go home and change. We’ve got to look serious when we go in there.” He nodded toward the building Igor had gone into. “Do you have a jacket?”

  “A jacket?… Yeah, I got one… It goes with a blue suit.”

  “Awesome!” said John Smith. “Do me a big favor. Wear the suit and some leather shoes.”

  “I don’t know if it even fits me anymore. I got it before—well, it must a been three or four years ago.” Nestor relived the whole mortifying scene then and there… Mami taking him into the men’s department at Macy’s… him standing there like a wooden idiot… Mami and the clerk talking—in Spanish—about how far down this should go and how far up that should go… only speaking to him twice… Mami saying, “¿Cómo te queda de talle?” and the clerk saying, “Dobla los brazos y levanta los codos delante”… and him caring about only one thing… the horrible chance that somebody he knew might see him like this.

  “Before you started working out at Rodriguez’s?” John Smith smiled.

  “Well… yeah,” said Nestor.

  “Awww… just do the best you can, Nestor. You can squeeze into it.”

  “I suppose next you’re gonna want me to wear a tie,” said Nestor, inflecting it with a touch of sarcasm.

  John Smith’s eyes lit up. “Hey, you own one?”

  “Yeahhh…”

  “Wear it!” said John Smith. “I will, too! We’ve got to look serious! That building’s full of Active Adults. You know? They’re not going to appreciate it if we show up as if we’re going to the Honey Pot. Not even a twisted geek like Igor will appreciate it. We are serious men!”

  15

  The Yentas

  Seven hours later, 10:30 a.m., Nestor and John Smith were driving… or, strictly speaking, John Smith was driving… into the parking lot of the Alhambra Lakes once more, this time in John Smith’s brand-new gray two-door Chevrolet Assent. John Smith thought it would be rude to park Nestor’s Camaro in an Active Adults’ parking lot in daylight. The Camaro was a muscle car from back when muscle cars were muscle cars, and it was pimped out so ferociously, it would shove its mug into any Active Adult’s face and snarl, “I’m a youthful offender. You got a problem with that?”

  Of course—hah!—John Smith didn’t say “rude” or anything close to it. He expressed it in carefully hedged, gentler words, but on this killer-bright day John Smith’s good manners annoyed Nestor… his manners, among a dozen other things. Still inside the Assent’s air-conditioned cocoon they trolled slowly toward the building Igor had disappeared into last night. In flagrant sunlight like this, the place looked even worse than it had in the dark. All around the base was a stretch of raggedy bare ground that no doubt at one time had been flush with lush green shrubbery. Here and there about the rim of the parking lot you saw a palm tree here… and two there… and then a gap… and three there… gap… then another lone palm tree… The whole place appeared snaggletoothed. The palms were limp and wan… the leaves bore puce-colored splotches. On the building’s facade the little iron balconettes and the aluminum frames for the sliding doors looked as if they were about to fall off and die in a pile.

  John Smith pointed and said, “Hey, look… Igor’s Vulcan’s gone.”

  So far, so good. Before they confronted him, they needed to know a lot more… such as what he was doing here last night… and what and where was all that stuff he hauled inside. John Smith made a U-turn at the end of the row of cars and parked in the most remote section, the one for visitors.

  When they got out of the car, Nestor was really annoyed. He put on the jacket of the suit John had talked him into wearing and slid the necktie up. The jacket was too small, as he knew it would be. On top of that, John Smith insisted
that Nestor carry a 9½-inches-long, 3½-inches-wide, 1½-inches-thick dosimeter—a device for measuring noise levels—in an inside jacket pocket. If anybody challenged them, Nestor was to pull out the dosimeter, and he, John Smith, would explain that they were taking noise levels. A too-tight suit bulging with a fifty-cubic-inch machine on one side—great. Before he had taken his first step, he could feel the inside of his shirt collar turning sodden with sweat… and sweat soaking through his jacket, creating big dark half-moons under his armpits. The suit, the tie, his black leather cop shoes… he looked like a real guajiro… John Smith, on the other hand, had on a light-gray suit that fit perfectly, a white shirt, a navy tie with some kind of stuffy, orderly print on it, and black leather shoes trim and narrow enough to go dancing in. He acted like it didn’t bother him at all… the damned WASP… Then he had to rub it in:

  “Nestor!… you look great! If you knew how good you look in a suit, you’d never wear anything else!”

  Nestor had never seen the WASP in such a cheery mood before. So he shot him a finger. But John was in such a good mood, he started laughing his head off over that.

  The whole sky was the pale blue dome of a heat lamp. Nestor hadn’t walked a hundred feet before he could feel the sweat pouring out for real. The parking lot was so still, he could hear their footsteps on the asphalt. Yet practically all the parking places for the tenants were occupied. Just then a hoarse, grumbling, transmission-slipping, piston-done-for bus, the small boxy kind, painted white, came groaning in off the road. The fenders flared up in big curves like the wings of a pelican in flight. It pulled up not far from Nestor and John. On the roof a foot-high sign stuck up in the air from front to back: SHOP ’N’ BROWSE BUY BUS! It seemed to be a bus service that took groups of people from their Active Adult and Assisted Living homes to shopping centers and back. The driver hopped out. Look at that suntan!—a skinny young Anglo who looked as if his hide were just shipped from the tannery! He hustled around to the other side… to help a lot of old ladies get off, judging by the voices. They didn’t sound tired. They sounded excited.