just a little batty

[Progress Note: This one isn't finished; I'm posting it bit by bit as I go, or it would be sitting around forever.]

I've always had this thing for bats. I have no clear notion of where this passion, called morbid by the ignorant, originates; but I've always loved the fuzzy winged things, in their insane zigging and zagging contributing to the bewitching magic of a summer night.

Bats feature prominently in my childhood memories, and mark several pillars and milestones of my maturing life. A little weird, I suppose; but let's just say the macabre seems to have set me apart for its own in some ways from my infancy. The following are some free-association anecdotes (some plotless and pointless) relating to one of nature's most curious mammals.

I. There Goes the Fear Again

Mom hates bats. Mom fears bats. Mom lives annually in dread of the night a bat will squeeze its way through the attic trapdoor into my parents' room and make a beeline for her hair. For this reason she always looks a little tired in summertime. She reacts to bats the way I react to spiders when I'm lucky enough to have someone else around: Every muscle seizes and all power of speech flees but the involuntary shriek to "KILL IT!"

For countless years in my growing up, Laura and I would awake to muffled screams and thumps and muttered curses from our parents' room, and we'd leap out of bed and dash into the hall and celebrate the carnivalesque of the indoor bat, adding our jumping around and shouting, "Where is it?" to the general din.

Also for countless years, after Dad patiently caught them in an old towel we kept around for that purpose, he would take them outside and come back and tell us he'd let it go. It wasn't until I watched from my bedroom window one night, after Laura and I had been banished back to our rooms, that I discovered that "letting them go" meant swinging the towels with superior masculine strength against the sidewalk.

In all fairness, I'm sure he let a good number of them go, until they kept coming back. Even so, I thought this all very barbaric -- I loved bats -- until the night our parents were out late and Laura and I had to contend with a fluttering panicked intruder on our own.

II. Scrrrrritch Goes the Rodent

We had a cat. A very smug, intense cat exuding a confident awareness of his masculinity from kittenhood. He kept his claws meticulously sharpened. He stared out the windows in daylight, his entire body quivering with the desire to kill, emitting strange squeaky mews every now and then when the quivering could no longer adequately express the desire.

Alexander Pennington Farnsworthy (also known, for reasons understood only by my mother, as Greubie) lived for the kill. We never allowed him outside, and so he had to content himself with window sitting and quivering and squeaking...until summertime, the Season of the Bat. In those months he came into his element. And we stopped having bat problems.

Specifically, we stopped having live bat problems. Laura, upon whose bed Alex preferred to sleep, began waking up in the mornings to see, with her nearsighted pre-contact vision, blurry dark splotches in the middle of her carpet. Clambering down from the bed, she crouched and bent close and peered at the splotch...which resolved itself two inches from her nose into a bat lying curled up on its back with its face contorted in a silent, openmouthed snarl of death and its beady eyes fixed lifelessly on hers.

So then her shrieks announced the summer mornings. But Mom began sleeping through the nights, as Alex, whom we titled Bat-Killer, or Batsbane, with his deadly prowess kept vigilant watch over the house. Quick and efficient, our Greubie, we would say, boasting of his skills to our friends. Never wakes us up.

Until the night Mom and Dad were out quite late, and Laura and I were left to our own devices. Being the Brady Bunch teenagers that we were, we actually did our homework, ate dinner and went to bed on time. (Disgusting.) As I turned out my light and hit the hay, I thought with satisfaction how proud Mom and Dad would be to find everything so orderly when they came home.

An hour later a hideous screech brought Laura and me bounding terrified into the hall and staring down the dimly lighted stairwell.

"What was that?" she whispered.

"I don't know," I whispered back.

"I think it's in the living room."

"Let's go see."

I grabbed a MagLite (if you don't have a gun, a MagLite is the next best thing -- it won't do any damage from a distance, but smash the handle weighted with four D-cell batteries onto someone's head and they won't bother you anymore), Laura retrieved Dad's old nightstick from under her bed (those were the days before they were completely outlawed) and we crept down the stairs.

It was in the living room. As the stairs groaned under our timid weight and the bannister permitted a straight line of vision downstairs, we froze transfixed at the tableau beneath us.

Greubie sat in statuesque stillness in front of the entertainment center. Before him, feebly attempting to climb the wood, hung a bat leaking blood all over the carpet. Greubie watched, let it climb an inch, and then, with an air of absolute detachment, reached out a single claw and jabbed it into the bat.

It screeched again. The sound reminded me of stones grating against each other underwater -- it brought goosebumps rippling over my arms and sank right into my bones. Scrrrrrrriiiiitch.

Alex removed the claw. The bat resumed its attempted escape. Cocking his head to one side, the cat then stretched out his other forepaw and jabbed again. (This is one of the reasons I say cats are scientists. His entire attitude clearly said, "Hm...I wonder what will happen if I do...this.") Scrrrrrrrriitch. (And then he sat back as if to say, "Huh. Whaddaya know.")

"Greubie, stop it!"

Laura and I came out of our paralysis and ran down the stairs and shoved Alex away. Having prevented cruelty to this mortally wounded animal, we now faced down the problem of what to do with it.

"It's too hurt to let it go, it's going to die anyway, it's suffering."

"We'll have to kill it."

"How does Dad do it?"

"He catches it in a towel and smashes it against the sidewalk."

"Ew."

"Yeah. I don't think we're strong enough."

"Well, let's get a towel and go from there."

We dashed down to the basement and rummaged through the rag bucket and grabbed a ratty old towel used to wash the dog. Running back into the living room, we dragged Greubie away from the bat, who had only managed to climb another inch, and with the towel I gently knocked it onto the floor and wrapped the towel around it.

I could feel it biting at my hand through the towel, and I was wrung with equal parts pity and fascination. Laura and I slipped to the back porch and tried to decide the most merciful way to kill it. On the floor by the door lay one of the huge beach rocks we liked to use as door stops, and Laura seized it, and I put the bat down on the floor, where it wriggled under the towel.

"Better let me do that," I said.

"No," she said, her face fierce and white in the dark. "I will."

"Okay. I'll count to three. Ready?"

She gripped the rock and bit her lip and nodded, staring at the towel.

"Okay. One..." She raised the rock. "...two...." She held it over the towel. "...THREE." She faltered.

"I can't!" she said.

"Okay, we'll try again. One...two...THREE." She faltered again.

"Here, give it to me." I reached for the rock. She yanked it back, yelled, "No!" and smashed the rock down on the bat.

One horrifying crunch and the towel stopped moving. We both stared at the still towel and cried while I said things at random. "It's not hurting anymore...it was the best thing to do...you did good..." And then, "Should we save the towel?"

At that Laura stopped crying and snapped her head around and said, with her trademark profound disgust, "No. Are you crazy? How are we going to wash bat blood out of a towel?"

"But it's Mom's."

"Mom won't want it after this. Let's just go throw it in the garbage."

So after torture, a gruesome death, and a brief mourning by two teenaged girls, the bat wound up unceremonially tossed in a garbage can on top of the cat litter and coffee grounds. Batsbane spent a few days in the doghouse, so to speak, and Laura and I proudly recounted our mission of hard mercy to a bemused Mom and Dad, and ever after Greubie meekly brought his quick and efficient kills to the center of Laura's carpet.

III. No Thank You, Mickey Mouse

I'm nine years old, and Mom and Dad have scraped together enough money to take the family to Disney World. We're roughing it old-school (for Florida): borrowing my grandparents' motor home and camping close to the park. Laura and I spend our evenings splashing in the campground pool, where I finally learn how to swim, and squealing at the swarms of red ants.

Laura and I are young enough that even the boredom of waiting in endless lines is exciting. Everywhere the huge figures of Mickey and Goofy and Donald and Daisy and Minnie walk around waving and hugging the children. I'm old enough to know they're costumes, and to feel a mixture of pity and revulsion at the damp heat radiating from their felt skins when I give them the expected hugs -- it's so hot.

Money is tight, even on this vacation, and souvenirs are small, but to my dazzled happy eyes even the tiniest dolls are magical. I clutch my little skirted Minnie (I've never liked Mickey much) in one hand and one of my parents' fingers in the other and stare around at everything with huge delighted eyes.

The names of the rides mean nothing to me, divorced as they are from sensory experience, so ever after my memories blur together like a strange spliced montage -- dark misty rivers with allosaurs and brachiosaurs looming through the palm fronds overhead (I explain to my parents the identifying differences between the allosaur and the tyrannosaur -- the trip falls in the middle of my dinosaur phase), teacups carrying us into a night sky over a tiny London after Peter Pan, the hour sitting in a big saucer when the ride breaks down and Dad almost loses his sanity listening to enormous mechanical people singing "It's a Small World" ceaselessly, the sketetal feet of reveling pirates swinging over our heads (the guy in the car in front of us jumps up and grabs a bony ankle), the vivid colors of flowers and cloth at EPCOT, the utter darkness of Space Mountain.

But the ride I anticipate the most is the Haunted Mansion. Anticipate in terror: My nightmares often wake me in a cold sweat in general, and I live in cringing fear of spiders and ghosts and monsters under the bed. But I grip my father's hand tight and follow my family into the car.

The ride goes by in a fuzzy breath-stopped awareness of mirrors and curtains of cobwebs and greenish light, but I leave the gift shop with one of my childhood's favorite toys: A life-sized plastic vampire bat. As we walk back to the park entrance in the dark and fireworks explode over the Disney castle, I clutch my new friend in wild happiness, all fear forgotten. The thing in my hand is scarier than the things in my mind, and I keep it like a guardian icon under my pillow.

On the long trip home, I decide my vampire bat is a girl, and that her name is Gloria. I have my mother cut the elastic loop from the back of Gloria's neck so that she goes from creepy decoration to creepy toy, and for years afterward, of the vast array of plastic animals from which my sister and I have created entire kingdoms of good and evil filling the living room, Gloria always leads the armies of light against the armies of darkness, and even then the irony is not lost on me.

IV. Another Reason I Hate Girls

I've never been much of a "girly girl." I prided myself on my tomboyishness in my childhood, climbing trees, scraping my knees, beating up all the boys, catching all manner of disgusting worms and insects with which to terrorize the other girls. As an adolescent, I learned to paint my toenails and I loved to talk about boys, but science classes always revealed my truer nature: In freshman Bio no one in my group would touch the lamprey eel to dissect it, and in contempt I seized the scalpel and dove in and took great pleasure in grossing out my group members telling them how cool and smooth the insides felt.

I grew into an appreciation of pretty clothes and the domestic arts, and have been often told that I am in all ways feminine, even in my hard-nosed appreciation for the grotesque and in the ferocity handed down to me by generations of woad-wearing Scots; so everything evens out in the end, I believe. Even so, or perhaps because of that, I hold in deep scorn the women whose idea of femininity comprises professional helplessness and wilting fainting terror at anything creepy and crawly (I hate spiders myself, but after four years of living alone or with people who were more frightened of them than I, I have learned to cope with grim efficiency) -- mostly and especially wilting fainting terror in large numbers. Nothing irritates my librarian Virgo soul more than an enormous gaggle of screaming girls (and I do mean only girls -- a big group of bellowing men from time to time holds a certain testosterone-laden appeal).

My sophomore year in college I was unfortunate enough to have been selected based upon my academic standing to join a sophomore girls' service honorary. It looks great on resumes but comprised the most profoundly and obnoxiously boring stretches of time I ever spent in college. Of the thirty girls in the group, twenty-seven of them were the girliest on campus, and all our meetings were presided over by the ancient VP of Student Affairs: She of the Red Kirtle, whose sole purpose in living was to marry us off to Grove City boys. I spent most of the meetings sitting silently in the back with the other two normal girls who, like me, thought the whole matter a frivolous joke, and when I wasn't exchanging revolted glances with them, I was fiddling wistfully with my pen, contemplating the cost-benefit analysis of sticking it in my eye.

Of all the stupid 1950s Junior Ladies Society things we did, my least favorite came in the spring: a town-wide service cleanup headed by our honorary and its male counterpart. A lot of campus organizations participated, and while I looked forward to sweeping out semi-derelict buildings, I dreaded the initial gathering: Grove City-style, the men were to meet in one place and the women in another to have a little pep rally before heading out to do good deeds.

Early on a Saturday morning the girls convened in the grottiest lounge our college could boast, in the basement of the largest girls' dormitory. Everything was painted white, from the cement block walls to the naked piping latticing the low ceiling, and the smallest whisper echoed as if in an endless cave. I sneaked in the back way to avoid having to talk to all the girls making the walls pulsate with their giggling, and waited for the circus to begin.

It began far more interestingly than I had anticipated. As the president of the girls' service honorary stood up to begin her saccharine speech, everyone began to scream. My head snapped around looking for an axe murderer, but then I followed the pointing fingers and saw what was causing the commotion like a massacre of banshees: A single bat, a dark shadow relieving the stark white of the room, had lost its way among the piping.

As the screams and shrieks intensified in volume, it threw itself frantically at the tops of the pipes, and before I had formed a conscious thought I was shoving through the crowd of helpless idiots hissing, "Shut up, their ears are sensitive, you're making it more upset," and hurling myself toward the bat.

Quiet began to fall as I threw my hands into the air and began to herd the bat toward the back door and the maze of basement corridors. I felt infinitely sorry for the wretched creature whose life depended on its keen sense of now-deafened hearing, and deep camaraderie in our mutual plight of being stuck in the middle of a group of morons with no sense. It allowed me to direct it, and soon we were out of the Rec Room and I closed the doors behind us and tried to find the nearest exit.

In what I can only imagine was exhausted relief at the sudden silence, the bat began zooming back and forth, just out of reach of my arms, and for a little while I could only stand and keep an eye on it. I was trying to direct it toward an outside door when it took off in the opposite direction, flying six inches from the floor. I followed it around a corner and saw, to my horror, a cafeteria worker attempting to step on it.

"No!" I shouted, and she stopped and looked at me, a confused expression on her blocky face, but I hurried toward her and said, "Help me get it outside -- shoo it toward me."

Her face said plainly that she thought I was nuts, but perhaps the fierce look on my face kept her quiet, and she started flapping her apron at it. I ran back to the door and pushed it open; the bat came toward me; I waved my hands and practically pushed it outside. I watched its zigzagging flight in the free air before it disappeared toward the darker corners of the courtyard.

I took a happy breath, thanked the mystified woman who demanded to know why I wouldn't want it killed, said, "I want it free," and headed back to the basement lounge and the girls whose very existences now annoyed me.

As I pushed open the doors, every eye in the room turned toward me nervously. They looked at me as if I weren't quite human; as if they didn't know whether to thank me or to be even more afraid of me than of the bat.

"Is it gone?" someone finally asked in a small voice.

I looked around and said calmly, with just a hint of condescension, "Don't worry. It's gone."

A few more cautious questions followed, a few muffled exclamations about my bravery and insanity, and, my weirdness solidified in everyone's mind, they turned back for their pep speech. I stood alone in the back and half-listened, wishing I too could dart into the morning air and wing my way toward a juniper bush, replete with my own darkness, quiet, free.