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.