The Bat

The old cotton mill on the west side of the city had stopped running. The machines rusted where they stood in the workshops, and when the wind blew, the smell of rust mixed with mothballs and damp and crept into your nose. The workers moved away one by one, until only Tang Fuhai was left to watch the gate, living in the little gatehouse by the main entrance. He was sixty-two. His wife had died two years before; his son delivered parcels in the provincial capital, and his daughter had married into a neighboring county, so he saw neither of them more than once a year. He did not weep or make a fuss. Each day he still swept the ground in front of the gatehouse until it was spotless, set a pot of pothos on the windowsill, soaked a jar of medicinal liquor, and at night boiled himself a bowl of plain noodles with half a dish of pickles, then listened to the radio until he grew sleepy and dozed off where he sat.

The mill was old, its roof built in the old sawtooth style, and in the tallest row of ventilator housings nested a colony of bats. Every dusk they flapped out in a black swarm that skimmed right over Tang Fuhai's head, and each time he flinched. At first he disliked their droppings on the steps and poked a bamboo broom into the ventilators a few times; the bats shrieked and scattered, and he felt no better for it, for they were living things, after all, and there was no sense in making enemies of them, so in the end he let them be.

That autumn a pale grey bat fell onto the gatehouse windowsill, smaller than the rest, its wings limp, as if something had hurt it. Tang Fuhai thought it was dead, but when he leaned in he saw its belly still rising and falling. He found an old carton, lined it with scrap cotton, and set the bat inside to catch the sun. Two days later the little creature came round, fluttered its wings, yet instead of returning to the ventilators it hooked itself into a corner of the gatehouse, hanging upside down from the top of the window frame like a small grey rag.

Tang Fuhai let it stay. He lived alone; another companion was no bad thing. When he listened to the radio, the bat hung motionless overhead; when he talked to himself, cursing the mill for holding back his pension, cursing his son for not coming home in half a year, the bat said nothing, only listened. For the first few days he even left crumbs of steamed bun on the sill, until it dawned on him that bats eat insects, not such fare, and he switched to a small saucer of fresh water. The bat flew out to hunt at night and was always back before dawn, hanging in the old spot, as if it had taken to the place.

And so the days passed, plain and uneventful. The mill was finally to be torn down; the last few workers who had stayed on moved away too, and the whole compound went dark except for the single lamp in the gatehouse. Tang Fuhai was told he must move out the next month as well, to his son's place or to low-rent housing, but he had not yet decided.

What happened came on the night before the demolition. The radio by Tang Fuhai's pillow was still humming its thin tune; he was asleep when a sudden beating of wings woke him, the grey bat circling right before his face, squeaking in a hurry, raw and urgent. He started up, thinking it had gone mad, and waved it off, but it would not leave; it darted toward the inner door, then wheeled back, then darted out again. Tang Fuhai cursed his luck, threw on his clothes, and followed it toward the workshops.

The workshops stood empty. Moonlight fell through the broken roof, patchy light and shadow on the floor. Following the bat, he heard a faint scraping from the direction of the switch room, where a thief was prying open the distribution box with a screwdriver to strip the copper wire and sell it, and the sparks he struck had already lit the old cotton waste in the corner; smoke had just begun to curl, thread by thread. Tang Fuhai grabbed the iron shovel at hand, drove the man off, then shoveled earth over the fire until it was out, and sat on the ground gasping for a long while.

He looked up. The grey bat hung from the beam, quiet, as if nothing had happened.

On the day the mill was flattened, Tang Fuhai packed the gatehouse pots, his medicinal liquor, and the pothos into cartons. The ventilators were long gone; the colony of bats had flown somewhere he did not know, and the grey bat had not shown itself for some days. Before he turned off the light, he left the window open a crack.

The next day the moving truck came. He looked back one last time at the empty window frame. Far off, on a roof eave, a small grey shape flickered and was gone, and he could not tell if it was the bat. He smiled, and climbed into the truck.