My marriage isn’t an especially old-fashioned one, but whatever you think about traditional gender roles, there are some things that, at least in my house, remain man’s work. My wife almost never changes a light bulb, doesn’t often deign to take out the trash, and has only a vague idea of where I keep the screwdrivers. In our family, some jobs call for a man. For instance, fighting off bats.

It was a summer night. We were in bed watching TV. The lights were off and the Tonight Show had just started when something flew into the room through the open bedroom door, close to the ceiling, and then flew back out into the hallway. What was that? I thought maybe it was a moth. It would have been the biggest moth ever. My wife thought maybe it was a bird. At night?

It flew back into our room, and we knew.

It was a bat.

That’s when my wife started to scream. It sounded like this: “Ahhhhhhh!”

She continued screaming while I rolled out of bed and grabbed my shirt from the floor and swung wildly at the blood-sucking menace flying into our room and out into the hallway, back and forth. I was on the bedroom carpet, trying to stay low, my shirt still in my hand. I didn’t see the bat anymore. It wasn’t in the hallway. And I didn’t see my wife. I was alone in the room.

While I’d been gallantly defending us from the bat — a task for which I lacked proper training — she had run to our bathroom and slammed the door. I opened it. She was crouching on the toilet seat.

I told her to stay put. I’d look for the bat. I didn’t know what I would do when I found it. Or what it would do to me.

I looked downstairs in the kitchen and living room, but didn’t see any bat. I came back to our room and looked everywhere — under the bed, in our closet, behind the dresser. I thought that maybe I’d swatted the bat with my shirt and knocked it into a corner or something. But it wasn’t in the room.

My wife wouldn’t come out of the bathroom. I promised her that there was no bat in our room. Our bedroom door was closed and all of our lights were on — I assured her that bats only liked the dark and wouldn’t bother us. I almost convinced myself. She finally accepted that the lights would keep the bat away, and left the bathroom and we tried to sleep. We could hardly sleep, with the lights on and expecting a bat to fly around any second, but at least it was bat-less sleep.

The next morning, the exterminator came over and told us that bats often live in attics. He inspected ours. The good news was that we weren’t infested. This was a lone bat. It had probably gotten into the attic through some tiny hole from the outside, likely was in the attic right now, sleeping. Bat-man couldn’t find the bat — they like to hide in the insulation. The previous night, the bat had probably squeezed through the small gaps in the ceiling around the attic’s pull-down stairs and ended up in the hallway outside our bedroom. They could even squeeze under a bedroom door. And they could carry rabies. My wife freaked out. The bat could have gotten into our room in the middle of the night and attacked us in our bed. It hadn’t, but it could have. And no, the exterminator told me, bats weren’t scared of the light. My wife shot me a look.

He advised me to seal up the attic stairs. The bat would either leave the attic for food the way it had originally come in, or would die. Either way, problem solved. Would a dead bat stink up the house? No, it wasn’t big enough for that. It had looked pretty big when it was flying into our bedroom, but I took his advice. He said that bats come out around nine at night to hunt for food. If for some reason the bat was still in the house, we’d know soon enough. We could call him if it showed up. He didn’t live far. My wife wanted to go to her mother’s for the night, but I assured her that the bat was in the attic. There was nothing to worry about. I would take care of it.

I went to Home Depot to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape. Lots of other people were there buying plastic sheeting and duct tape, too, because the Department of Homeland Security had recently advised them to be ready to protect against a chemical attack by terrorists. There wasn’t a lot of plastic sheeting and duct tape left, but I found some and brought it home. I taped the plastic to the ceiling all around the attic stairs, using extra duct tape. Now our house was safe from bats. And terrorists.

Sure enough, we were in the living room watching TV, a few minutes past nine, when the bat swooped in. The lights were on. My wife screamed. It sounded like this: “Ahhhhhhh!” She had thrown herself flat against the couch, in a panic. I covered her with a blanket to protect her from the bat, which circled above. It flew out of the room. I told her that the bat was gone. When she heard that, she was gone. She grabbed her keys and ran to wait it out in the car. I was alone with the bat, once again. It swooped back into the living room. I called Bat-man.

He showed up ten minutes later. We knew the bat hadn’t come from the attic, not with my terrorist-proof plastic sheeting and duct tape. So he looked in the dark basement, which is a walk-out that functions as a family room — there’s no door separating it from the living room, just a half flight of stairs. And that’s where he found the bat, hanging from the blinds. He netted it and showed it to me before putting it in a small box. It was an ugly thing. He said he would take it far away and release it. I don’t know what he did with it, but I saw him take it from our house.

My wife could return. We figured that the bat was never in the attic at all, but had flown in through the open kitchen door when we were barbecuing the previous evening, and had spent the day sleeping in the basement while Bat-man searched the attic. The bat was gone, but my wife kept expecting it to come back. She told me she could still see it. For months after, whenever something caught my eye and I turned to look at the ceiling or a wall, she would ask, “Is it a bat?” But it never was.

About Scott Stein

Tags: animals, reflections & recollections by Scott Stein //