McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (35 page)

 
          
 
This was going too far for Lolly, who looked
at her friend with a shocked expression. The notion of celibacy was clearly one
she had never entertained.

 
          
 
"Not do it at all?" she said.
"With your own husband?
You better be glad Eddie didn't
hear you say that. Shoot, Bobby would run me over with a car if I was to tell
him I didn't plan to do it at all."

 
          
 
Janie Lee looked unrepentant. "We could
still dance," she said. "That's about all me an' Eddie like to do
together, anyway, and we can't even do that if he stays in
Florida
all the time.
Me
an' you paid our own way into the disco every night last week."

 
          
 
"Yeah," Lolly said, as if a sad
truth had just been revealed to her.

 
          
 
"I don't like to think about it,"
Lolly added. "I'd rather do almost anything than think."

 
          
 
My heart went out to her. In general, it was a
heart that went out at odd moments. It had gone out to Coffee while she was
trying to stuff the hippo chair into her blue Chevelle. It went out to Cindy
because she liked to sleep holding hands, and now it was going out to two fat
wet girls on a rubber mattress in a fairly low-grade pussy parlor.

 
          
 
"Aw," I said. "Then don't
think."

 
          
 
"Can't help it," Lolly said, with a
little gulp. "Janie Lee got me started and when I get started I can't
stop."

 
          
 
She was silent for a moment. Janie Lee was
silent too, evidently chastened by having caused her friend to think.

 
          
 
They floated quietly for a while. True to her
own prophecy, Lolly had not been able to stop thinking. While Lolly thought,
Janie Lee paddled in the water with one foot. I realized she was trying to turn
the floatie so she could watch her soap. I helped her turn it. When I did Lolly
nudged me intimately with one of her plump little feet.

 
          
 
"Lookit," she said. "You ain't
even got a hard-on. You
shouldn't never
have got us
talking."

 
          
 
"We don't usually talk," Janie Lee
said.

 
          
 
"We knew you'd come back," Lolly
said. "I even had dibs."

 
          
 
"Dibs on what?"

 
          
 
Lolly looked surprised. "On fuckin', what
else?" she said. "Janie Lee
don't
care
'cause she don't like it as much as I do, anyway."

 
          
 
"I do sometimes," Janie Lee said,
defensively. "But sometimes I don't."

 
          
 
"Anyway, I had dibs," Lolly said.

 
          
 
"Sometimes I don't care if I never do it
again," Janie Lee said, reflecting on her periods of sexual disinclination.

 
          
 
"Then why'd you wanta quit secretarial
school I'd like to know?" Lolly asked. "If you don't wanta fuck a lot
you oughta get another job."

 
          
 
Janie Lee was silent. Lolly's logic was more
or less irrefutable.

 
          
 
"I do sometimes." she said, a little
plaintively.

 
          
 
Lolly sighed. "We ain't usually
gloomy," she said.

 
          
 
“I don't know why he'd believe that,"
Janie Lee said. "All we've done is lay on the floatie and talk
depressing."

 
          
 
"Well, it's his fault, too," Lolly
said. "He coulda done something."

 
          
 
Four eyes, all blue, looked at me with faint
reproach. I had stood by and let a whole Soap Opera special fizzle away into
sobering thoughts.

 
          
 
"Well, it's too late now," Lolly
said. "Penny's coming with a whole station wagon full of Representatives.
That Penny knows a bunch of people."

 
          
 
"Okay, but she is twenty-six," Janie
Lee said. "If this keeps up you an' me will know about half the world by
the time we're twenty-six."

 
          
 
Then their spirits bobbed up, as buoyant as
the mattress.

 
          
 
"Least I didn't get water up my
nose," Janie Lee said.

 
          
 
When I left, the two of them were giggling
again and slipping into billowy blue negligees, in anticipation of the station
wagon full of Representatives.

 
          
 
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.

 
          
 
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 whole 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.