Sure enough, as I was sitting out front studying a road map, trying to figure out the quickest way to Riverdale, Maryland, where I was to meet the nest collector, whose name was Bryan Ponder, a green station wagon pulled up right beside me, a tall woman at the wheel. She glanced at me briefly through sunglasses as black as tar, and then got out and marched into the Double Bubble, followed by five or six nervous men in ugly suits. Lolly and Janie Lee had obviously called their next shot.
Chapter X
Riverdale, Maryland, is one of those American places that seem to stand outside the stream of time. It is just a little grown-up-around town way out Rhode Island Avenue, and what has grown up around it is postwar America. Nothing in Riverdale is either really old, or really new, and the home of Bryan Ponder, the nest collector, was no exception.
It was just an ordinary white frame house that stood in a cul-de-sac near the railroad, across the street from one of the oldest laundromats I'd ever seen. Two large women were standing in the ancient laundromat, watching diapers swoosh around. They looked like they had had about eighteen children each and might have a few more, if only to have an excuse to come and visit one another at the laundromat.
When I knocked on Bryan Ponder's door only silence answered. Then, through the silence, I could hear the distant sound of a TV—a baseball game was on. In fact, the World Series was on. I heard the crack of a bat, the roar of a crowd.
I knocked again, harder.
"Mr. Ponder," I said. "Are you there?"
A sound that I took to be a grunt of assent came from somewhere deep in the house. The door was not locked, so I pushed it open a little way, far enough to enable me to look into a room that was cluttered even by the standards of a person like myself—which is to say someone long accustomed to the kind of clutter human packrats gather around them.
The living room was entirely full of nests, except for a narrow track down the middle and a space over in one comer. The space in the comer contained a black-and-white TV, of a vintage comparable to that of the washing machines in the nearby laundromat. It also contained a large stuffed chair with a small stand beside it, the sort off which people eat TV dinners. A very tall old man sat in the chair, watching the TV set.
Beyond the chair another narrow trail wove between more stacks of nests, into another room.
The living room was filled with nests to a depth of about three feet, with more nests piled and stacked on mantel and windowsills. Most of them were birds' nests, of every size and description, though one comer was filled with cones of dried mud that resembled the cones crawdads make, except that crawdad cones were smaller.
The old man in the chair didn't look around. He wore a white undershirt and old khakis. Mud-dauber nests were stacked against the back of the chair.
“Mr. Ponder?" I said, tentatively.
"Come in and shut up, goddamnit," he said.
I stood quietly in the little lane between the piles of nests. Hardened as I was to bizarre collections of objects, I still felt a little odd. There must have been five thousand nests in the room, ranging from ordinary bird nests to great sacklike objects hanging from hooks on the wall. The sacks seemed to be made of Spanish moss.
The TV set across the room had a picture almost as white as the old man's hair. I could vaguely detect the figures of ballplayers on the screen, but since the ballplayers were in white too they seemed extremely ghostlike. The old man didn't seem to mind.
"Only thing that hasn't changed, since my childhood," he said. "Baseball. Only thing I recognize, out of what was once a healthy civilization."
On the screen a ghostly pitcher threw a ghostly pitch, and a ghostly batter missed it. The crowd cheered and the old man rose out of his chair.
"Got him on a breaking ball," he said. "Seventh inning stretch."
He looked at me for the first time and held out his hand. He was almost five inches taller than me, which put him close to six feet ten inches.
"Ever see so many goddamn nests?" he asked. "These here are relatively uninteresting. Just nests I picked up along the way. Better nests in the dining room. Go take a look."
He was right. In the dining room were cocoons the size of footballs, and nests so spiky it was hard to see how a bird could sit on one without being impaled. The small path led through the dining room to the kitchen, where more nests were stacked on the cabinet. A big gray hornet's nest was on top of the icebox.
Out the back door I could see a big barnlike garage, much larger than the house. I knew that meant yet more nests. Collectors don't let space just lie around empty. So long as there's a cubic inch they can cram stuff in, they won't stop buying, and they won't stop buying even when there isn't.
Bryan Ponder had followed me into the kitchen. He seemed fairly relaxed himself, at least during the seventh inning stretch.
"What's in the garage?" I asked.
"Fossilized nests," he said. "That's what got me started. I bought my first nest in Baghdad. How about that?
"I was in the spying trade," he said. "Bought a bustard nest, fossilized. Most people don't even know bustards nest, but they do. That nest is probably fifty thousand years old. I saw it and thought to myself, 'My god, a bird sat in that nest fifty thousand years ago.' That's what got me started."
Then he went back to his chair. The eighth inning was starting.
"What do you do, son?" he asked.
"I'm kind of a trader," I said.
"You want to buy my nests?" he asked.
"Are you sure you want to sell them?" I asked.
He nodded. "Damn right I want to sell 'em," he said. "I'm tired of nests. Make me an offer."
"I don't know what I'd do with them," I said.
"Why, you'd have them," he said. "What do you think I do, lay eggs in them? Go out in the garage and look at the ant cones. I've got five digger ant cones out there. You won't find another one in America. The only other cones in private hands are in Orvieto, which is in Italy."
"What are they doing in Orvieto?" I asked.
"Just being had, like my cones," he said, a little impatiently. "Guy there collects them. Count Guiccoli. Between us we've got about all the nests worth having, although there's a mechanic over in Sussex who has a few nice nests."
"Have you seen the Count's nests?" I asked.
"Of course I've seen them," he said. "Used to live in Italy. Spied on the Vatican for Harry Truman. Harry didn't trust the Pope."
Then the conversation lagged. The baseball game was close and Bryan Ponder was reluctant to turn his attention from it.
I wandered out to the garage and poked around awhile. It was truly an amazing place. It was clearly where Bryan Ponder kept his larger nests. Several of the nests in it were immense. There was a condor nest from the Andes—I know that's what it was because it had a little piece of paper stuck in it that said "Condor nest from the Andes." One whole side of the bam was filled with fossilized nests. Some were large and some were small but all were definitely old.
At the back of the garage there was part of a large tree. Its leaves and vines had long since turned brown but up in it was a kind of abstract nest, made of branches. The tree was thicker than a telephone pole and the branches that formed the nest looked like they could have held up a gorilla. I couldn't imagine what kind of bird could have needed such a nest. It would have needed to be a great deal larger than any bird I had ever seen.
As I wandered through the garage I began to feel flatter and flatter. I felt something resembling postcoital sadness, without having even had sex. Something had suddenly gone wrong in my relationship to objects, and my relationship to objects was more or less the basis for my life. Women came and went from me, or I came and went from women, but there were always objects, in their endless, infinite variety. In many years of scouting, I had never really tired of them.
Now, suddenly, I was tired of them. Somehow I had suddenly lost my appetite for the bizarre. Here I was, in a truly amazing place, looking at perhaps the preeminent nest collection in the whol
e world, and I didn't really care. My response was dried out and a little abstract, like the dead tree in Bryan Ponder's garage. I had just O.D.ed on objects. I didn't want to get up and dig through the thousands of nests in the hopes of coming out with a half-dozen so extraordinary that I could sell them immediately to any great dealer or great museum. A day there had been when I would have moved every nest in the place to find those half-dozen, but that day had passed. The whole pursuit suddenly seemed empty. What did I want with nests? What did I want with anything?
I sat down on one of the huge, hard, fossilized nests and rested a bit, hoping the mood would pass.
While I was sitting, I heard the slap of a screen door and in a minute Bryan Ponder appeared in the door of the garage. The World Series must be over, at least for the day.
"I've got the nests, don't I?" he said, gazing happily around the garage.
"You've got 'em," I said.
"What kind of nest is that?" I asked, pointing at the strange tree.
"Oh, that's a gorilla nest," he said. "It don't look right— oughta be green—but that's what it is. Gorillas like to sleep up high, where they can get a little breeze."
I felt terribly sad, for no reason that I could explain. I felt like I had unexpectedly reached the end of my road, the one I had been traveling haphazardly but enthusiastically all these years. It ended at a gorilla nest in Riverdale, Maryland. So far as I knew, no scout in America had ever found a gorilla nest, and what's more it was for sale. I could buy it, capping my whole strange enterprise and making myself unique in the annals of American scouting.
But then what?
"Well, I hear they're selling the Smithsonian," Bryan Ponder said. "You gonna get in on that?"
"I don't think so," I said, listlessly.
That I had no urge to was in itself sort of terrible. I hadn't even pressed Hobart Cawdrey to let me look at the Smithsonian warehouses that might still be for sale. Even if I didn't want to buy 2,000 cannons I could still have gone and looked at the weapons. I had fantasized about those warehouses for years, and then had not really even tried to worm my way into one of them. Actually I felt like the sight of a warehouse full of anything would have filled me with despair.
"What's the matter, son?" Bryan Ponder asked. "You look a little down."
"I guess I am," I said, offering no excuse.
"Well, this town'll get you down, if you ain't used to it," he said, in a rather kindly tone. "It's fine for spies and newspapermen but it ain't everybody's cup of tea. Maybe you oughta move to Minnesota."
"Why Minnesota?" I asked, curious.
"I'm from Minnesota," he said. "A good climate but not many nests. The tropics is where you go to find your best nests. Who's gonna buy my nests if you don't?"
"Well, I guess you can't sell them to the Smithsonian," I said. "They'd have to make reproductions of all of them so they could sell the originals."
He grinned a big gaunt grin. The notion of someone making reproductions of his thousands of nests didn't startle him at all. I wondered vaguely if there were nest forgers, just as there were hubcap forgers, but I didn't ask.
"Maybe you're in the wrong trade," he said. "Maybe the spying trade would suit you better. Traders make the best spies, anyhow. In my younger days I was a trading fool. When I was in the Balkans I even traded for a wife."
"What'd you trade?" I asked.
"Well, I traded a secret," he said. "It was a fake secret, actually, but it got the job done."
"How did it turn out?"
He looked at me solemnly, in a way that made me wish I could take the question back.
"It turned out fine till last year," he said. "Then she died. She put up with me and these nests for thirty-four years. Then she died. I never knew a human with a lovelier voice. Ain't that strange? I spent thirty-four years just listening, I liked her voice that much."
"What was her name?" I asked.
"Sophie," he said. "Don't you know anybody that'd buy these nests? Now that Sophie's dead I've lost patience with 'em."
"Well, there's Big John," I said.
Five minutes later I had him on the phone. He wasn't in his antique bam in Zanesville, but they said I might catch him at a certain chili parlor in Cincinnati, and I did. Naturally he was eager to buy the nests. His plan was to spray them with some kind of liquid varnish and disperse them through a network of roadside produce stands in the midwest. Travelers who stopped to buy a few tomatoes could buy a varnished nest as a souvenir. Of course that would only work for the small nests. The large nests would require different merchandising skills, but I was sure Big John had them. He could sell anything, and was willing to buy anything, too. The thought of having several thousand nests excited him a lot. He said he would leave for Washington as soon as he finished his chili. He believed in the instant strike, which is probably why he is such a successful trader.
I envied him his excitement, his zest for the buy. I had had the same zest until quite recently, but it seemed to have utterly vanished. I walked back through the house with Bryan Ponder, feeling absolutely zestless.
"I wonder what the floor will look like, when he moves all these nests?" Bryan Ponder said.
I think it had just occurred to him that he really was going to lose all his nests. The sound of Big John's voice had convinced him he was dealing with a serious man, who would soon come and take his nests away.
It was probably a surprise. Many collectors fantasize about selling their collections, without really expecting it to happen. Sometimes they go so far as to set wheels in motion, only to balk at some point in the transaction. They think of it as a fantasy, or a dream they will soon wake up from, but often they don't come fully awake until some dealer is carting their collection out the door. Then they get really upset. Sometimes they stop the deal, much to the dealer's disgust. Sometimes—if the dealer is adamant— they even buy their own collections back. Or else, unable to bear the sight of their own space, they begin a new collection the next day.
It didn't seem likely that Bryan Ponder was going to start picking up nests again, though. His surprise was mild. He walked me out to my car, more bemused than anything.
"Think about Minnesota," he said, noticing that I had not exactly perked up. "It's a wonderful place. New, mostly. I favor new places."
He glanced down the street, in the general direction of Washington, scratching his ribs through his undershirt as he looked.
"Now you take Washington," he said. "It's old. People in old places get picky. They run out of energy so they make do with taste, which is not as good a thing. What you've got in
Washington is a nineteenth-century town wishing it was an eighteenth-century town. It's just a damn graveyard of styles. That's why I live in Riverdale."
It seemed an odd speech, coming from a man who lived across the street from the world's oldest laundromat. But then it would have been odd to hear a normal speech from a man who claimed to have 11,000 nests.
"If Sophie had lived I would have kept them," he said. "Sophie finally got to liking nests, but then the cancer killed her off. I think I'll just sell them to that fellah. Find out what the floor looks like."
He gave me a friendly wave as I drove away.
Chapter XI
It was only about four in the afternoon when I left Bryan Ponder's—nearly three hours before I was due at Jean Arber's for dinner. Ordinarily I would have nosed around the Hyattsville-Riverdale area, seeing what I could find in the local antique shops. But I wasn't in an ordinary mood.
What I did instead was drive out to Greenbelt, Maryland, where I sat in the parking lot of a Safeway for two hours, watching people come and go with their bags of groceries. I felt blank, neither depressed nor elated, neither interested nor bored. Watching the humble citizens of Greenbelt carry out their equally humble bags of groceries was not an exciting way to pass the time, but it was sufficient. One woman's sack burst as she was passing in front of my car and she looked so distressed that I got out to help her. The s
ack contained mostly Spam, plus a few cans of frozen orange juice and a stalk of celery. I guarded the Spam while the woman went back to get another sack.
I knew that at some point I had to call Cindy and tell her a lie, but no lie came immediately to mind and I kept putting it off. That proved to be a mistake, because while I was sitting watching the afternoon traffic back up on the street in front of me the car phone rang and it was Cindy.
"I thought you were going to call in,” she said. "Where are you?”
"I'm out in Frederick," I said, instinctively placing myself about fifty miles from my actual location.
"Come on back," she said. "Lilah's throwing a little party. She wants us."
"Uh-oh,” I said. "I don't know if I can make it.”
There was a moment of silence. It was not a pleased silence, either.
"I told her we'd come," Cindy said, as if that fact rendered the matter closed.
"I thought you were dependable," she added. "What are you doing in Maryland, anyway?"
"I'm waiting to see a man about a gun," I said.
"Are you kidding me?" she said. "You're going to screw up this party because of a gun?"
"I didn't know there was going to be a party," I pointed out.
"You would have if you'd called in."
"I called in several times but the line was always busy," I said. It wasn't true, but it was plausible.
Cindy was silent again. She was not particularly contentious—argument for argument's sake didn't really interest her. Her view of life was grounded in certain simple verities, the main one being that she should get whatever she wanted. It was not so much a facet of selfishness as of extreme good health. To be denied might mean being unhappy, and she was too healthy to allow herself to be unhappy.
Unfortunately she had caught me in a rare mood. I wasn't particularly looking forward to having dinner with Jean Arber and her daughters, but neither did I want to go to a party at Lilah Landry's. I felt like I might just sit in the Safeway parking lot for several days, watching people carry out bags of groceries. I had settled in nicely to that life, and I wasn't ready to leave it.