Steven and I went up to ye olde towne of Alabaster last weekend to celebrate a menagerie of occasions: an anniversary, a birthday, and two Father’s Days. There’s another anniversary coming up this weekend — the last two weeks of June are crazy. We traveled up there Friday night; the original plan was to go see The Killers at the City Stages Festival, but that plan was dropped once we sat down and realized how tired we all were. After all, I’ve already got The Killers on my iPod, so I’m set.
We settle down to bed a bit after eleven, once I had caught the good parts of the Late Show. I could have gone to sleep earlier but David Letterman never ceases to amuse me. Not long after we fall asleep, I begin to have some vague dream involving graduates. They were all trying to get my attention with mortar board and degree in tow. Then they morphed into little insects wearing mortar boards with their degrees rolled up in their mouths, whacking on the window to get my attention. Ping, ping, ping. It was weird stuff. What did I eat that evening?
Soon enough I wake up and realize the pinging is coming from the window. I wake Steven up with a half-asleep, questioning grunt. He says it is just bugs running into the window panes. The porch light is still on ’cause Dad hasn’t returned from Montgomery yet, and that light is well-known to attract little flying critters. I hate that light.
We lay down to go back to sleep, and the little bugs with their mortar boards are at it again, just louder this time. It isn’t long before Steven is up and turning the light on to have a look. Along with the tapping we were hearing a metallic pinging — a weird sound for a wooden window frame to make.
“I think something’s inside the curtain rod,” Steven says.
“Ewww.”
As Steven gets closer to the window, however, he sees something moving behind the blinds, which are closed. “No, there’s something behind these blinds,” he decides. “It looks big.”
“Err, how big?”
“Pretty big.” Then he holds out his thumb and forefinger to me, indicating about four inches of unseen terror that fluttered behind the blinds.
“God, is it a roach?” Now I am up and getting ready to flee the premises.
Then Steven starts to open the blinds a bit to get a better look. Later he said he was thinking it was a moth and his idea was to open the blinds enough for it to fly out. He loosens the blind wand a little bit, stops, then asks, “Uh, what is this?”
I venture closer to have a look. My first thought is it looks like two big roaches sorta stuck together, moving back and forth around the little pivot joint they created. Then I realize what it was.
“Oh God, it’s a bat! It’s a bat it’s a batitsabatitsabatitsabat . . .” I chant as I turn tail and head into the kitchen. Steven follows suit, shutting the bedroom door behind him.
“Ahh, it’s a sign,” he suggests, “It’s a sign we need to go and see Batman Begins.”
Maybe so, but if this is Warner Brothers’ idea of a marketing campaign, I am not amused.
We decide to wait until Dad gets home, which he does after about fifteen minutes. He walks in the front door and we immediately tell him there’s a bat in our room.
“You’re kidding.”
“No, we’re not. We named him Scratchy.”
Then we lead Dad to The Beast. We find we can see it much better when we look through the window from the outside, on the front porch. Sure enough, there is Scratchy, hanging upside down as bats are wont to do. Dad goes down to the basement for a few minutes to find some weapons and comes back up with some dandies. First, he’s got a net that we use at the beach. Second, he’s got one of those long pincher things that you use to get stuff off the floor without bending down. Those are always fun, especially when the person in front of you doesn’t suspect anything as you grab their ear.
We follow Dad into the bedroom where the battle will begin. I really thought this was going to be a comical disaster right out of an episode of I Love Lucy, and I was ready for the bat guano to fly. However, those pinchers worked better than I imagined: Dad just wedges it in between the blinds, grabs hold of Scratchy, and slowly pulls him out. Scratchy starts to protest in the form of small squeaks, and Dad calls to Steven, “Open the door!”
The door is opened and out goes Dad, carrying this bat with these little pinchers. An amusing sight for 12:40 in the morning. As Dad comes back in the house, Steven says, “:Now you’re Batman.”
The next night we did go see Batman Begins. If the residential bat release thing was a marketing ploy by Warner Brothers, well . . . it worked, dammit.
