The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

BATS Diane de Avalle-Arce

It was the old and cruel custom of the shoeshine boys of Guanajuato, when they had no pressing matters on hand, to catch a bat and make it smoke. You nail the bat to a board fence, by each wing, and put a lit cigarette in the mouth as it opens in a soundless shriek. The tip of the cigarette glows and smoke curls out of the bat’s nostrils, as though it were enjoying a gringo’s rubio tobacco.

This is no longer done, by order of Manuel Aceves, chief among the shoeshine boys of the barrio of San Martin. Rose, the lady who wore white gloves, had something to do with it, and so (though he never made the connection) did Dr. Murphy, a prominent physician in the American colony. Rufina, who keeps the Bar Zotzil on top of La Valenciana, might claim some credit, but she and the grey cat have enough to do without concerning themselves about such things.

It was and is the custom for the gringos to emerge from their pink villas on the outskirts of Guanajuato just before sundown, and drive up to La Valenciana for their evening drink. They admire the view and complain about the laundress and the lack of parts for their cars. This being the hour when the hand is more willing to reach into the pocket and extend a bill, not waiting for change, Manuel Aceves with his shoeshine kit was accustomed to climb the stone steps zig-zagging up the hill to the mine, cutting the loops of the road between nopales and yucca.

The evening of his revelation, he was late; it was nearly dark, and the ground was cold in the shadow of the hill, although the sun behind the mountain gilded the twin towers of the church of La Valenciana. Manuel usually pretended he was the Emperor Moctezuma climbing the Great Temple of the Sun—though he is all four quarterings Chichimeca of Guanajuato and proud of it—but this evening he forgot the Emperor Moctezuma, watching the bats leaving the church.

They came out in a thin spiral, like smoke rising from a small fire, then in a twisted column, a pillar growing upward, larger at the top like a funnel, spinning faster and faster. The funnel danced back and forth as the wind pushed it, until the bats streamed out eastward in a cloud, passing over his head. He heard the hissing of hundreds of thousands of little wings, making a downdraft of warm ammoniac air around him. Still the bats poured out, the long cloud like the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, while the sky behind the mountain turned from gold to red to the clear cold green that precedes the deep indigo of night.

Already the church looked a horned bulky animal asleep, and the Cafe Zotzil crouched at its foot like a smaller animal with open glowing eyes, when Manuel Aceves humped his shoeshine box into the bar. The place was almost full, with only Rufina to run back and forth with drinks, while the grey cat minded the bar under the grinning mask of Zotzil the Bat God.

Manuel ordered a Coca-Cola, and Rufina threw a dishrag at him and said she hoped that Zotzil would eat him.

“Come, Rufina,” he said, “the old gods are dead. The Spaniards killed them. Then we Chichimecas killed the Spaniards, until we got tired of it, and when we wish, we will kill the gringos, too.”

“Throw yourself in the well,” responded Rufina, loading her tray.

The Bar Zotzil was the old well-house of La Valenciana mine, when the mine had produced silver enough to build and decorate a hundred churches a year. Those times were long gone. The mine was sealed and the church empty, but the well was still there: a hole five meters wide in the floor, with a railing. Green water rushed past the hole, over a pale sand bottom. There were no fish, but the grey cat watched the water just in case, and the gringos threw cigarette butts in it.

Manuel shrugged and made a face at Rufina’s back, then composed his smooth copper mask for business. Dr. Murphy first. Grey laceless shoes with tassels on them, grey pants and jacket, grey hair, grey face with purple veins. Dr. Murphy drank whiskey in the Bar Zotzil from sundown until the bar closed, although he slept much of the time. Manuel flashed his smile and said, “Shine? Shine?” Without waiting for the answer, he went to work with his rags.

Before he’d finished, la señora Carol sat down at the table. A pink lady, hair like a cornfield in stubble. Manuel had once thought of charging her extra because her feet were so long. Her shoes were pink lizards, which gave him pause for thought. Rummaging through his box, he listened to the conversation; Manuel understood more English than he let on.

They talked about the restoration of the church, which la señora Carol said was a project close to her heart. Manuel did not think gringos had hearts, not like people had. Restoring the church was not close to Manuel’s heart, but if more tourists came to the area because of it, he wanted their business. On the other hand, if the Minister of Culture came to declare the church a Historical Monument, beggars and shoeshine boys and women selling lace tablecloths from baskets would be banished. So he listened carefully. La señora Carol wanted Dr. Murphy to contribute to the fund for illuminating the church.

“To shine like a good deed in a naughty world?" said Dr. Murphy. “It’s a robber baron’s bad conscience construed in masonry. That’s all it amounts to. Leave it to the bats. ”

“Ugh,” said the lady, fanning herself with a paper napkin. “I can’t bear bats. The illumination should get rid of them if it does nothing else. Do you think the Board of Health would bear part of the cost?”

“Why?” said Dr. Murphy. He finished his whiskey. “If they ask me, I’ll tell ’em more people die in a year of church-picnic potato-salad than of bat-related disease in a century.”

“You can’t be serious. What about vampire bats, which I hope those aren’t? Don’t the cattle ranchers—”

“If the cow had the choice of providing you with a steak dinner, or a bat with an ounce of blood, she'd choose to accommodate the bat! Rufina! Another of these. Why, the bat’s saliva is an anti-coagulant with antibiotic properties, she’d be none the worse. Whereas the steak—”

“Phillip, you do have the oddest take on things! I hope you’re not going to set yourself up against the whole North American community just when we’re doing something that will really make a difference!”

Manuel finished the shoes with his brightest smile and held out his dirty hand, which la senora Carol pretended not to see. Dr. Murphy gave him a five-hundred-peso bill and said to keep the change, which would have been better if it were not a one-hundred-peso bill with false corners pasted on it. Manuel sincerely hoped he gave money like that to la señora Carol for her restoration fund.

He looked around for more customers, but it was a bad evening for shoes; in dry weather, the dust of the brown hills does not cling to the mirror-surface of shoes shined by Manuel the previous evening. Helping himself to a Coke behind Rufina’s back, he settled on his heels in a corner.

“ ‘Oh, fat white woman whom nobody loves, why do you walk through the fields in gloves?’ ” said Dr. Murphy through his teeth in a funny way.

Rose—the gringa round like a squash or a real person, instead of chili-shaped like the other gringos—came in like a cow with staggers and dropped into a chair. She was as red as her namesake, and pressed both her gloved hands against her breastbone; slowly, she turned white as trout-bellies.

The other gringos didn’t like Rose because she lived in the town, over the shop that sells silver and turquoise birds, and gave pesos to street children and told them to go to school.

“Have a glass of water—where are your pills, for God’s sake?”

Rose shook her head. She took a fish head out of a plastic bag and put it under her chair for the grey cat. “I can’t, I told you—I can’t take the pills. If I take them, I can’t sleep.”

“Your blood pressure is literally killing you,” Dr. Murphy snapped. The grey hand trembled with the glass. “I can’t understand how you’ve survived this long.”

La señora Carol changed the subject, because gringos don’t believe in death. They never take food to the Animas for the Day of the Dead, never. Manuel knew.

“Do you know you’ve come just in time to see the illumination of La Valenciana? Any minute now they’ll turn on the lights!”

Rose looked even sicker. “Tonight?” she said in a thread of a voice. “I thought it was next month?”

“Oh, the mayor and the American consul, and just possibly the Minister of Culture, will come next month, for the dedication of the plaque crediting the American colony. But the outside illumination is ready. It’ll be wonderful, just you wait and see.”

But Rose was up and blundering into the rail of the well. She grasped it and looked around. Manuel, with an eye to opportunity, was at her elbow in a moment.

She flinched, then leaned on the hard dirty little arm. “You’re Manuel, aren’t you? I have a job for you, if you won’t be afraid.”

“I, afraid? Manuel Aceves is pure Chichimeca, and the meanest shoeshine boy in barrio San Martin!”

“I thought so,” said Rose.

Rufina appeared. “Does the señora wish to lie down?”

“No,” said Rose. “Manuel and I are going to the church now.”

“It will be locked, señora. The workmen are all gone.”

“That’s all right,” said Rose, taking a big iron key out of her bag.

Manuel, piloting the lady out of the Bar Zotzil, was not surprised that she had a key to the church. If you pay enough, you can have the key to anything you want. But why? There was nothing of value in La Valenciana. Or was there? Did the gringa know of hidden treasure under the altar? Who knew what the old Spaniards might have hidden in the church, under tons of bat guano in the belfries? Manuel’s step quickened.

Outside the yellow fan of light from the doorway, it was dark as Rufina’s braid, although the stars blazed long trails overhead.

“The side door,” said Rose. “This one.”

Inside the church, it was dark as a mine. Only the high altar glinted gold from the windows, a blind naked cherub with yellow curls here, the halo of a saint there. But Rose seemed to know her way, unsteady but determined, and Manuel half-followed and half-supported her up a winding stair behind the stone baptistry. They went up and up, and Manuel realized they must be climbing the west tower.

At the top there was a door, unlocked, and Rose pushed it open. Her breathing was shallow and rapid, but Manuel held his breath, looking for the treasure. There would be gold, and silver, and emeralds, and rubies, and pearls! He would take it and buy the whole city of Guanajuato, like a plate of glazed salt-clay food for the Day of the Dead: the Market and the Fort with the Mummies; the streets full of businessmen in suits the color of flour; the taxis and buses and the cars of the gringos; the policemen and their carbines; schools and banks and bars, and houses where the women wore paint and laughed so loud you could hear them all over the barrio.

But he could see nothing in the tower but the grey rectangle of the louvers, though he knew they must be under the bell-mouths, huge and black. He smelled cold bronze, and dust, ammonia, the plastic coverings of new electrical wires. Rose tripped on something and her full weight on his shoulder made him stagger. She rummaged in her bag.

“Thank you, Manuel. You can go now. Here’s a hundred pesos.” She snapped on a little flashlight with a cloth tied over the glass. Huge flickering shadows sprang up on the walls, two figures drawn up to dizzy height, crossed by black bars of beams, blurry with cobwebs and inches of dust. There were footprints in the dust on the floor as if it were sand, workmen’s boots, Rose’s shoes with heels, Manuel’s bare feet, rat-paws, and some marks that were none of these.

Rose sat down cross-legged, with a gasp. “Can’t you find your way out, Manuel? I don’t need any more help now. ”

“I want to stay, señora, truly.” For Manuel was Chichimeca of Guanajuato, and any treasure there might be was his as much as anyone’s.

“All right, if you won’t be frightened.”

Manuel, frightened? Never since he could remember.

Rose was speaking in a low voice, he did not know whether to herself or to him, making no move toward where treasure might be hidden. He could see no sign of it.

“The lights,” she said. “They’ve put floodlights all over, and opened the louvers. It will be light day and night. You won’t stay here, Jimmy; you can’t. This will be the last time. Jimmy?”

Manuel, squatting on his heels, watching, wondered if she might be wandering in her wits, for she had drunk no whisky nor even beer at the Bar Zotzil. She took off her gloves and pushed up the yellow sleeve of her blouse. She stretched out the left arm, trembling, with the back of the hand resting on the floor. And such an arm: pale as melon, mottled with red and violet, the blue veins twisting the bone from which the flesh hung slack.

She whistled. It was a high thin sound, as to a very small dog. Manuel followed her eyes and saw a bat, not hanging but right side up, crouched in the angle of a rafter. The flashlight beam showed its pug-dog face with ears pricked, wings like an umbrella half-unfolded. The mouth opened candy-pink, but what struck Manuel most was the unblinking black eyes that didn’t reflect like an animal’s at night.

“Here, Jimmy,” whispered Rose, and the bat dropped to the floor in a brief flutter of membrane-wings as wide as Manuel’s forearm was long.

He almost thought he heard it answer, like a feather in his ear. He was so afraid he crossed himself, as he had not done since his mother died, but it was no good, a bat that lived in the bells of a church must have no fear of anything.

The bat hitched itself along the floor on its rat-feet, helping with the long wing-thumbs. Manuel did not move, and every detail printed itself on his memory, like a painting on glass. The bat looked at him, looked into his eyes as no animal could do, nor any rich person in a cafe, and saw him, Manuel Aceves as he was, and opened its mouth. It had tiny sharp teeth, like thorns.

“Hold still,” whispered Rose. “He’s nervous of you.”

And Manuel held still as though a spell were on him, because here was the Bat God Zotzil in the tower of the church of La Valenciana, and he had never believed in either of them.

The bat came with its humping gait, and climbed onto Rose’s fingers. The hand lay quiet but the blue veins quivered and rolled over each other. The bat nuzzled her wrist, here and there, and held to it. Rose breathed, low and steady, many times, as it sucked the vein.

At last she put out her other hand, and, with her finger, stroked the bat, like Rufina stroking her cat when she was in a good mood. The bat arched its head back, and Manuel saw a mark like ink on Rose’s wrist. It didn’t bleed.

“This is Jimmy,” she said. “Several of them will come, but he’s the only one I can pet. See if he’ll let you. ”

And then Manuel proved he was who he was. He stretched out his own dark paw and touched the bat, like warm silk, like the finest glove leather, and felt its heart beating, and heard Rose’s harsh breathing and his own in the moment before the floodlights went on, brighter than day.

No one noticed their return to the Cafe Zotzil but Rufina, because all the gringos were admiring the illuminated facade of La Valenciana—except Dr. Murphy, who was asleep in his chair with his head on the table. Manuel removed some hundreds of thousands of pesos from his pocket and from the handbag of la senora Carol, under the indifferent gaze of the grey cat, and slipped down the hill in the darkness.

There was after all no treasure, and Rose was right that the bats would never come back to La Valenciana. She died some weeks later of a heart attack in the rooms over the shop that sold silver and turquoise birds. Manuel was sorry. By then he was no longer a shoeshine boy, but a boarder in the school of the Aescolapian Brothers, because a man of power, a man who has touched the heart of the world and seen it is far, far bigger than Guanajuato, must have the education to rise above the barrio San Martin.