The Bats

Short Story/Author: Joy

It’s not the threat of rabies. It’s not the vampire stories, nor the old-wives-tale that they get stuck in your hair. It’s that you’re never certain whether you saw it or imagined it. Did the light flicker, you wonder as you stand in the kitchen doing dishes?

The flicker happens again. A third time. And you finally see the bat. Flying, weaving the drunken pattern of a college student leaving a bar, a toddler chasing a puppy. But it’s neither of those. It’s a rat with wings, buzzing at your head, never stopping. Elusive. Disappearing. Reappearing. Taunting, threatening, seeing how close it can get and still miss, doing the limbo, closer and closer. Anyone who tells you they’re peaceful creatures that get a bad rap has never awoken to one dive bombing your head during the night.

The bats had found their way into the brick pillar outside the house, and for a week I’d been on the internet researching ways to extract them. My daughter had just come home for the first time since leaving for college in the fall, and the two of us were stuffing the legs of my old pantyhose full of mothballs, dangling them over the edge of the pillar into the crevice where the bats were hiding. I was on a dual track explaining to her the purpose of pantyhose in general, and explaining the specific purpose of the contraption we were making in hopes of extracting the bats. “We thought they made our legs look sleek. The smell will irritate their little bat noses and they won’t want to hang out in the pillar.”

It had been 25 years since my last encounter with bats. Fifteen, if you counted the one in the washing machine. I’d packed my then-young daughter to visit my parents across the country, and on the second day, my mother had let out a scream from the laundry room, followed by a loud bang as the lid of the washing machine crashed shut. This, a reaction to finding a bat inside the drum of the washing machine. Without a better plan, she decided to go ahead and run the wash cycle. The machine filled with water that moments earlier had been meant for dirty socks. It shook, gyrated, drained, then frantically spun, and when it finally stopped, we cautiously lifted the lid. After using a yardstick to poke the bat, stuck to the side of the drum, we confirmed it was dead. My little girl begged to see it, sticking her head into the open lid and staring, wide-eyed, amazed at the dead mammal. Killed by gentle cycle.

As a method of exterminating bats, the moth balls were a poor substitute for the old Kenmore of my childhood home, but these bats were outside, hiding in the pillar that held up the garage, not in the washing machine. “Do you think the moth balls will work?” my daughter asked. “I have no idea,” I replied, “but it worked once before.”

A week later, we had an answer: the moth balls didn’t work. Now the garage smelled like a plastic bin full of wool sweaters, and it was nearly impossible to breathe while I used the treadmill in the garage. When the treadmill stopped, and it was quiet, we continued to hear tiny squeaks and scratches. “At least they’re confined to the pillar,” I recall thinking the night before the bats began making their way inside the garage.

The holidays were already going to be a struggle. Like so many my age, this was my first Christmas without a mother. I had become an orphan and an empty-nester in the span of one month. We had just laid my mom to rest a month earlier, in the cemetery across the street from our old house, now with another family living in it, but otherwise looking just the same as it had during the 30 years my parents had owned it. I never thought I’d live in a house that bats liked as much as that old three-story Victorian with old-fashioned radiators and a front door that locked with a brass skeleton key, but that turned out to be a romantic notion that didn’t hold any weight. Bats like tract houses in subdivisions out in the suburbs just fine. I’d glanced over at the front porch of the old house during the funeral service, half-expecting to see my mom out there on the porch swing, snapping green beans or shucking sweet corn, even though I knew she was in the pink casket before us.

One summer when I was the daughter at home from college, I’d slept on that front porch the entire month of August. The house had no air conditioning, and I was trying to escape both my family and a hot bedroom. My mom had dragged an old mattress out there for me, and I plugged in my alarm clock and read Jackie Collins books by the light of the street lamp. I was joined out there one night by my mother. A bat had found its way into the house. My mother wasn’t afraid of much, but she hated when a bat was in the house. She ran onto the front porch screaming, shutting the screen door behind her and crawled onto the mattress next to me. “May I sleep out here with you?” she asked with her school-teacher grammar.

If anyone had walked up the big stairs onto the front porch that night, we’d have been quite a sight. Two grown women cuddled in fear on an old mattress with the soft red light of my digital alarm clock shining on us while a bat had the run of a 5-bedroom house. That bat somehow made it out—I don’t remember how—it probably came to life 24 hours later and most likely we would’ve sat on the porch swing talking, waiting to see it fly out the front door.

The bats that had set up shop in the garage pillar of my current house—cookie-cutter on a street named after a golf course—these bats were inching closer, not further—terrorizing my ability to do simple tasks like take out the trash or grab the dust pan. More importantly, they were slowly stealing my sanity, appearing in the garage so frequently at this point, I began to see them inside our house—a place they’d not yet infiltrated—flittering overhead. Every blink of my eyes was a cause to question whether something could’ve just flown in front of the lamp. Every noise in the house seemed like the flap of wings. Every time the cat perked up, so did I.

It wasn’t just bats that were appearing in my mind this holiday season. I was seeing my mom everywhere. It turns out her trademark silver hair wasn’t trademarked after all, and every woman in the mall, at the gas station, and on the street who had allowed herself to go gray, was drawing an involuntary reaction (“it’s mom!”)

The only comfort from these imaginary-moms and garage-bats that I’d imagined into my bedroom, was the excitement my daughter felt at being part of the bat-monitoring and extermination crew. She had the enthusiasm that can only be felt by someone who knew they were a temporary part of the drama, and would soon be leaving it behind without having to solve it, without incurring significant cost.

“What time does the bat patrol convene?” she asked. Bat patrol consisted of standing underneath the pillar at dusk, watching the bats flit back and forth, trying to see clues of how they were accessing the garage. Step two was sitting inside the safety of the car, pushing the garage door opener from the confines of the car, and watching any bats fly out that may have gotten into the garage.

“What are you going to do when I’m not here for bat patrol?” she asked from the passenger seat of the dark, silent car. The bat extraction project had been going on for a month now, and it was the last night before her flight back to college. It was a fair question.

“I’ll sit out here alone, I guess. Call an exterminator. Keep a count of how many we’ve released from the garage, note the activity near the pillar. Be a valuable resource to the exterminator, even though my only value will be the credit card I give the exterminator.”

The motion sensor for the exterior garage light suddenly clicked the light on as a bat flew out, illuminating the bat and a smile on my daughter’s face, but failing to shed light on whether she found my sarcasm funny or was pleased our bat patrol had yielded a result.

She had barely left the next day when I was reminded of what my mom used to say every time I returned to college. “The house is so quiet.” I thought I understood what that meant at the time (how complicated could the absence of noise be?), but it took me 30 years to understand how the quiet of the house summons noises in your head. How the doubt and guilt create plotlines for stories that never die, just grow in magnitude, creating memories both half-real and half-imagined, like bats that are contained to the garage, but find their way into the house via the crevices in a wandering mind.

Surely that night on the porch, and that morning in the laundry room, surely, those were not the last two times a bat had made its way into the old Victorian after I’d moved out for good. How did mom get the bats out without me, and why didn’t she ever mention them?

My daughter’s plane arrived safely the next day, and so began the process of exchanging conversations with text messages. “How was the first day of classes?” I asked with my fingers. “OK,” she typed back. “Any bats tonight?”

It’s been seven consecutive nights without a bat in the garage, and four nights since my daughter asked how bat patrol was going. Seven nights isn’t enough time to summon the courage to look into the garage at night, so I continue to head out to the car at 9 p.m. every night to open the garage door from outside, watching in the dark a couple minutes, watching to see if something flies out. I think to myself that if I do this 30, or maybe 40 times, and nothing flies out, I’ll be ready to go into the garage again, ready to see only what’s out there.