“Oh my god, it’s a bat! Caesar’s got a bat!”
I had been dozing fitfully at the time. It was pre-dawn, and I had been stirred from my deep-cycle REM slumber by a vague awareness of something going on in the room. The lights had come on and Kim was up, that much I knew. I snuffled and rolled over, the way you do when you know there is something going on, and you really should at least open an eye, but all you want is to keep sleeping so you pretend that you haven’t noticed anything and hope that whatever it is, it gets resolved without your intervention.
Then came the cry of “Bat!” and our bedroom erupted in a frenzy of panicked activity. Kim leaped onto the bed, and stood there, with Abby in her arms, in a hunched, peeking-over-the-shoulder posture, like a woman in a cartoon standing on a chair to evade a mouse. I sprang out of bed, pulse pounding, and stood there like… like a wild-eyed, naked little man staring at a bat.
And let’s face it, there is probably no creature on this earth that is creepier—and certainly no creature you would less like to find in your bedroom (with the possible exception of Charlie Sheen)—than a bat. This was a relatively small bat—no bigger than a ham sandwich—but it was a bat nonetheless, all black and leathery, and it spread its gruesome bat-like wings and twitched menacingly as I inched closer for a look. Caesar, our homicidal cat, who was still circling his prey on the floor by the foot of the bed, reached out and gave it a provocative poke, at which point it fluttered and unleashed a macabre squeal. Kim and I shuddered and jumped back.
For several moments we both stood transfixed, the way you do when you are naked and groggy and trying to figure out what to do with a live bat in your room. Personally, I was hoping our home would catch fire, which would at least give me an excuse to flee out the window, but Kim had apparently determined that this was one of those few instances where she would defer to my masculine prerogative and she was clearly expecting me to do something.
“Get a paper towel!” she cried, as I was still thoughtfully assessing the situation and weighing alternatives. The “paper towel smoosh” is Kim’s favored method of pest control, and I suppose she must believe, having dispatched many a spider or bug with a wad of Bounty, that paper towels have the capacity to kill outright. I get the feeling that if a polar bear had lumbered into our bedroom that night she would have pressed a couple of sheets of absorbent two-ply into my hand and sent me confidently into battle. I, on the other hand, am more than happy to pick up a beetle this way, but I draw the line at winged mammals.
What I ended up doing was stripping a cover sheet off the bed and throwing it over the bat. It was a queen-size sheet, and I reasoned that if I had enough linen between me and the bat I wouldn’t be able to feel its “batness” through the material. I also remember thinking that I had used a fabric softener when laundering the sheet, and that perhaps the bat would be soothed into placidity by the sheet’s fragrant softness.
It worked. I wadded the sheet up like a giant paper towel, and with a broad scooping motion lifted it. There was no bat on the floor, so that meant I had him. I began moving out of the bedroom toward the patio, taking exaggerated, delicate tiptoe steps, with my arms outstretched and my head turned, the way you do when you’re carrying a bat the size of a ham sandwich in a downy soft, fresh-smelling sheet and you hope it doesn’t fall out.
Kim dashed past me to open the sliding door and as I stepped carefully past her and out into the night, I imagined that I looked a bit like a bomb disposal expert in action, except that instead of a bomb, I had a frightened bat in my hands. And instead of a bomb disposal suit I was wearing…nothing.
I gingerly leaned over the railing and laid the sheet down in the flower bed. Then I eased it back and sure enough something dark and creepy, about the size of a ham sandwich, fluttered out from under the sheet and vanished into the night.
I went back in, feeling brawny and Hemingwayesque, the way you do when you have vanquished a wild foe and protected your home and family from a menacing intruder.
Then I brought the sheet directly to the laundry room and got out the fabric softener.
