Bats

This is not a story about horses. I've just had my memory jolted recently in regards to some close encounters of the bat kind, and I thought I'd write about them.

My parents (and after the divorce, my mother) owned an old, large, three-family house. The house had been built in the mid-eighteen hundreds, and had some decidedly old "features". Ceramic knobs on the beams in the basement were an integral part of the wiring, for instance.

We grew up in the first floor apartment; the other two apartments were both accessed on the second floor, with third floor rooms in each. In one of the apartments we inherited tenants with the house, and they were there almost until my mother passed away - one himself passing away, and the other moving into a nursing home just before my mother died.

We went through a number of tenants over the years in the other apartment. That apartment had a door in the ceiling of the third floor hallway right at the top of the stairs. It gave access to the attic - a regular door, not your typical attic door. In order to access it, you needed to place a ladder at the top of the stairs, beneath the door. If the ladder toppled, you'd go down about 20 stairs and end up sprawled in the bathroom.

Both apartments also had little crawlspaces into the attic with half doors up in the third floor rooms. When I was a kid I loved those little doors - they were like Munchkin doors.

We also had another set of tenants: bats. Quite a few of them. In the summer, in the early evening, we'd see them circling around, diving, veering, catching their mosquito supper.

Anything that ate mosquitoes is all right by me. I liked our bats.

Over the years, various tenants would report bat sightings. Once, the very-pregnant wife got a shock when she went to open a window, only to find a bat hanging from it. Our first inkling that the bats were active again would be panic-filled tenants pounding on our side-door which accessed the stairway to the upper apartments. Screaming in fear or anger or both, demanding death to bats - I always thought it was funny. Miserable brat, I was.

The attic was off-limits to tenants, so my father, the delegated bat-executioner, would climb up a ladder at the top of the stairs, open the door in the ceiling, and haul himself up. The attic space was maybe five and a half feet high, and my father 6'1", so he'd always have to crouch over. In some places, there wasn't any real floor, just cross beams.

He would open the hatch to the widow's walk to get some light in, as well as bring an electric torch. Beaming the light into all the nooks and crannies, he would try to find the bats (he claimed, though he never found any) and any holes where the bats got in and out; and if he found anything that looked a likely access point, he'd patch it or stuff something into it and declare victory. He'd tell the tenants again to not leave the Munchkin doors open, and not to go up into the attic or even open the door to it.

As far as he was concerned, if they ignored his warnings any bat visitations were on their head.

And the next night we'd still see the bats coming out of the eaves at dusk to feast on the mosquitoes.

Fast-forward a number of years. A tenant had been a problem, had been trying to intimidate and threaten my now failing mother. I'd had to get involved with the jerk - sometimes I would be there and he wouldn't know it. When he'd start hammering on my mother's door and screaming obscenities I'd whip the door open and snarl at him and he'd run up the stairs so fast you'd think I'd held a gun on him - the asswipe was too much of a coward to confront a young woman, only had the balls to harass an elderly one. After finally getting them out, my mother decided she didn't want another tenant.

But she was sick and getting frail, and I decided to move into that apartment to keep an eye on her, take her to her doctor's visits, and be close by if she needed help. I didn't give any thought to the bats - we hadn't had a report of a visit for a few years.

One hot summer night, asleep with nothing on me but the bedsheets, I woke up terrified: something had just gone from my knee to about my chest, a soupcon of a touch, a flittering, a tingle... and then was gone.

"Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit!!!" I thought to myself as I jammed my eyes closed, pulled the sheet over my head, and lay there trying to not move at all, straining to hear my attacker.

The room had gone ominously quiet. I lay perfectly still, too afraid to move. Then I heard it: scritch scritch scritchscritchscritch scritch...

Thoughts going through my mind: "What the hell is he doing?? Where is he? I really need to turn on the light! There's no way I'm going to move! Hello, stupid: he knows you're here, it's not like not moving is gaining you anything! Get a grip! Turn on the fucking light! It's probably a mouse!"

Finally, I managed to pull the covers down off my face and look around. The scritching noise abruptly stopped when my sheets rustled, and I turned my bedside lamp on. I sat up and saw no one.

Boy was I glad no one had been around to witness what felt like hours spent cowering under the sheets. Relieved, feeling a bit sheepish, but still with a little niggling fear that whoever it was was standing in the living room around the corner, out of sight, but there... I forced myself to move, to get up and look - to face my arch-nemesisisis.

Just before I put my foot to the floor, I looked down. There, almost completely camouflaged on the dark brown section of the rug at the foot of my bed was a small bat trying to act nonchalant.

I had no experience dealing with bats in my bedroom. Little did I know that I would live to acquire that experience... but I digress.

I didn't have any gloves handy and didn't want to touch him bare-handed. Going out to the kitchen, I grabbed a paper bag and a tennis racket.

I'm still not quite sure why a tennis racket, except that it gave me a couple more feet to put between my hand and the bat. Using it, I tried to coax it into the paper bag.

The bat was having none of that: he clung onto the rug for dear life.

I nudged a bit harder. He clung a bit more desperately.

Finally, I managed to dislodge him and quickly closed the top of the bag, hoping that he was in the bottom and not squished in the folds. I threw a robe on and flew downstairs, opened up the door, and with the opening facing away from me shook the bag.

No bat. I shook it again. Yup, something's in there. I tipped it over, nothing. I tapped the bottom of the bag, and finally, the bat flopped out. He seemed alive, but wasn't moving.

I left him on the porch, and checked the next day. He wasn't there anymore, and I really hope he survived.

That was the first visit. I got a few more through that summer, sometimes finding them clinging to curtains, even walking around (I think they were juveniles - they didn't appear to be able to fly).

Once, as I was cooking up a batch of chili and had just lifted the cover to check on it, one flew down from the stove fan and landed on my jeans pocket.

After I got over my surprise (it isn't every day a bat uses you as a perch), I started to head out my back door and down the stairs. As I was going down the stairs, the bat started to climb. Up my shirt. Slowly, inexhorably.

"Stay THERE! Stay THERE! Stay THERE!!" I was chanting with each step. My mother, sitting in her kitchen on the other side of the stairway, called out "Who are you talking to, hon?"
I didn't answer, I didn't want to make any extra noise and startle it. I stepped out onto the stoop, grabbed the bottom of my shirt and started to dance around, flipping the shirt madly around, jumping up and down. I can only imagine what that looked like to a casual observer.

Finally he got the message and let go. He also ended up on the porch, a bit more violently than I'd intended. When I went back to check after telling my mother what had happened, there was no sign of him.

When thinking about these bat visits and my dumping them on the stoop unceremoniously, I sometimes wonder if maybe they all were really too young to be outside. I hope Miss Kitty, our calico cat, wasn't responsible for them dying a horrible death after I tried my best to "save" them...

Odd that I dredged up this memory today - it's the 17th anniversary of my mother's death.