When I ask how the bats carry bugs from the lake to their young here — I mean, do they carry the food like a plug of tobacco inside their cheeks? — the bat guys look at me like I’m a fool. Bats are mammals (well, of course I knew that). It shows me how much I’ve still been thinking of them as birds, regurgitating for their young. Instead, the three thousand females living here nurse their pups from their bat-breasts, after they emerge from hibernation and give birth — one pup per bat. The mothers need to eat their weight in insects to make enough milk, which is why they will make the long trip to the lake more than once each night. Little factories turning mosquitoes into milk. But I have trouble processing this information, hung up as I am on the idea of bat breasts. Twice as many breasts as pups.
The bat guys spar with each other in their own knowledge game, flinging around the terminology, the Latin names, Myotis this and Myotis that. They compete over numbers, who has seen how many bats of what species in what state in how many abandoned churches. I like the idea of bats being drawn to holy places (it makes me think of a drawing I’ve seen of Lucifer, looking like a hybrid of man and bat, caught at a sad moment, his wings drooping on the ground).
The two bat guys have a hard time speaking to us laymen because they have trouble gearing themselves down. I can almost smell their flywheels smoke, what with the friction between what they know and the version of it that the rest of us can understand. They tolerate us because they are so full of facts that they’ll explode if they don’t get the chance to eject some. But I think they aren’t eager to let too many people in on the secret of this place, whose light would be ruined by too many spectators filling it up with chatter.
The silver of the water surface intensifies when the trees grow dark, and just when you think you might pass out if there were to be a further silver increment — that’s when the bats begin to fly. The first one looks like a stunned bird moving in a daze above the picnic table and across the clearing. Long intervals come between them at first, but pretty soon time speeds up and bats start whipping through the air. We count to 250 in thirty seconds, the black threads weaving the twilight into a darker gauze from which the night is made. It takes maybe thirty minutes for all the bats to exit. In a squeaky voice, the child I’ve come here with reports on how he can feel his hair being lifted.
My last question for the bat experts is why the bats would choose a place so far from the lake, when there are many other abandoned piers in town because the timber industries that once ringed the waterfront have gone out of business. The bat guys say that no one knows; maybe it’s the size of the cracks between the boards here. Bats like to squeeze into not too large a crack, they say; like animals about to be slaughtered, or like some autistic children, they feel secure when they’re confined. Conversely, then, I wonder how vulnerable they feel when flying, and if this is why they restrict themselves by following such specific flight paths to the lake, after they stream in such precise columns from both sides of the trestle.
There’s a diminishment that comes when the spectacle is through. How unbearable, this forced return to ordinary life. On the way back to the car, my friends’ son holds the flashlight as we march along the road, the huge trees and the giant ferns invisible now. All we are is human, night-blind and wingless. Un-sonared. Then the night turns less than three-dimensional when the batteries in the flashlight die.
6
I was skeptical when the bat man told me to go down Rogers Street and look at this particular tree and at this particular alley, but here they are and there they go: flying toward all the nymphs waiting at the lake. Later that night, when all the indigo bleeds out of it, a woman comes barreling down the alley in her pickup truck, headlights off. She’s gunning for a guy who’s moving like a dustrag in the shadow of the privet hedges.
“Fuck you, you bastard,” she says. “I’m going to kill you.”
“You try to fucking run me down I’m going to call the fucking cops.”
Their hollering echoes through the tidy yards, and what the world sends echoing back is a cop car. But its trajectory lacks the precision of the bats’. Instead, the cop swings too fast around the corner and almost crashes into another car. It’s almost shameful — how, by comparison, our human choreography has so little grace.
7
When I went back to the alley another night, the man who owned the stucco house with the saddle-shaped roof came out to ask what I was doing out in his backyard. It occurred to me how strange a sight I’d be in the darkness, skulking. You lose many possible identities when you start to use a wheelchair, and skulker is one of them. But, on the positive side, I am not feared. This guy knows that since I can’t climb his stairs, I cannot be a thief.
But he seems unsure. Perhaps he thinks the wheelchair’s just a gimmick.
He tells me that the bats fly over his shoulders every night when he sits out on his deck. He’s a hearty guy about my age, gesturing with his cigar. I explain how they use his alley as a route to the lake — isn’t that intriguing, the specificity of their choice? How it’s his alley that they prefer?
When he asks suspiciously why I’m so interested in bats, I take it as a code: What is this rogue apparition doing in my alley? My answer sidesteps him — I say only that I’ve been going on bat walks with the bat guy — because the answer is complicated, how I’ve been playing these games to plug the holes where I’ve been torn by what my Buddhist therapist calls the waterfall of jealousy and grief. How bats are supposed to make me not resent my friends who head off to camp in the mountains. The true explanation would take all night.
Pretty soon the bats have all flown on, and the homeowner, satisfied that I am harmless, snuffs out his cigar and retreats into the house. After that, it’s just my brain alone with a crescent moon, which I see hanging over the schoolyard when I climb back up to Rogers Street. It’s the kind of moon that makes me think of the scythe that Mr. Death’s supposed to carry. Except, tonight, Venus shows up too and hangs inside the blade.
8
Three weeks later the bat guy convenes us once again. When first we gather, there’s still enough light for me to write down flying foxes and interpretation of the teats. When someone asks about mating bonds, we’re told that bats are promiscuous. I write that down and then remember how Dracula seemed so chaste.
(Scientists discover that promiscuous males that have the biggest testicles also have the smallest brains. But I read about this later, when the winter torrents bloat the rivers as well as the soil that should be holding up the hillsides but does not, the bats gone off to hibernaculums where the females incarcerate the tiny ticking bombs of their eggs.)
This time I ask the bat guy how come he’s not afraid of rabies, my mother having sworn to a story about how a little girl died when a bat bit her in her sleep. Then he explains the reason for his bravado — he’s already had the rabies shots, so he’s immune. Good — I want the bats to be in some percentage rabid, some percentage dangerous, I don’t want them to be too tame. Instead, I want risk to be tonight’s blind date. For his part, I notice that the bat guy doesn’t like to talk about his day job doing something boring for the state.
This time the bats don’t slice through the group assembled between lampposts 43 and 44, even though we can see hundreds of them feeding on the lake when he shines his searchlight across the water surface. I’m disappointed, although on this night I’ve come to see them fly across the harvest moon, which rises directly above the Ramada Inn, full and crisp in its topography. Even without binoculars its bright mountains are visible, as well as its dusty-looking plains.