Commando Bats

COMMANDO BATS

Sherwood Smith

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
September 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-551-9
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith

When I was young, aging women were interchangeable. Ugly,
slow, annoying with their unwanted opinions. It seemed impossible that I’d ever
be one. The first proof that the universe has a sense of humor? I’m half of
one.

Since the stroke that wiped out my livelihood, I’d taken to
tooling my electric scooter along the Venice boardwalk, or out to the Santa
Monica pier. I was on the pier that day when the second proof happened.

My goal was to work at training my left hand to mix colors,
but when too exasperated by juggling paints, paper, and water in the fitful
ocean breeze, I sat back and watched the fishers, patient and still, the
flirting young couples, and a man with his little boy tossing bits of bread up
in the air to the seagulls swooping and diving over the choppy green waters.

Then this compelling, melodic female voice spoke intimately,
as if right beside my ear.

“Excellent. You are what I want.”

That couldn’t possibly be me. I turned. Nearby stood two
other sixty-plus women. The tall, thin silver-haired one in the elegant
clothes, with the wedding ring the size of a Volkswagen, looked quickly away
from the sensibly dressed, solid black woman with the salt-and-pepper hair;
she, in turn, glanced from Lady Gotrocks to me in my motorized wheelchair, and
then away with an air of this has nothing to do with me.

“Yes. You.” The speaker sounded like an opera singer I'd
once worked with, back in my waitress days, when she was putting herself
through music school and I was studying art. The unmusical cadences of everyday
speech could not hide the melody intrinsic in her tones. It was just this way
with this woman: she did not shout, or even speak very loud, but her voice
rang.

I turned my scooter. The speaker was tall, with high piled
curly dark hair, and large dark eyes. She wore a kind of caftan thing with
stylized peacocks embroidered around the hem, and she carried a bag with
cleverly made overlapping fabric that looked like lotus leaves. I wondered how
much she had paid for it.

She stared straight at me. People usually don't. They see
the scooter and my lifeless right arm and the droopy right side of my face, and
look away quickly.

Peacock Lady gestured imperiously to the three of us. “Reach
into my bag.” That resonant, musical voice was so commanding I grabbed the
stick to move my scooter forward and then I thought, Wait a minute.

“Who are you?” the black woman asked, not quite hostile, but
definitely a challenge. “I don't touch anyone's handbag.”

“Excuse me,” Lady Gotrocks said in a Malibu drawl, as she
wiped her eyes on a linen handkerchief of the type I hadn’t seen since my
grandmother was alive. “I was just leaving.”

Peacock Lady held up a hand, palm out. She loomed, dark eyes
compelling under her cloud of curly hair, her complexion a warm bronze: she was
the archetype of beauty and majesty. "I have chosen you three to receive
my gift. Now, reach into my bag, or suffer my ire!”

I swear there was an echo from the Hollywood Hills.

“I know you all, for you come within my governance. I am
Hera. Now I order you for the third and last time: Reach into my bag.” She
fixed on me, as I was now closest.

The woman's ringing tones shivered through my nerves. I
reached up from my scooter to slip my fingers over the lotus leaves — which were
not fabric, after all, but cool and alive. “Your name?” she commanded.

“Nancy Litvak Fiala.” My voice came out a croak as my
fingers found what felt like a jumble of costume jewelry, some of which had to
have been kept in her freezer, for it was icy cold.

“Ahhhh,” Hera murmured. “That one. It is just.”

My forefinger touched a warm circle of metal, which slipped
on of its own accord. I yanked my hand out, staring. Was that a ruby on my
finger, or just sun-dazzle? I blinked, and the image was gone.

Hera held out the bag to the black woman next. Moving
slowly, bristling with suspicion, she stretched out her hand.

“Your name?” Hera — I may as well call her
that—demanded.

“Bettina Wilson.” Bettina slipped her hand in and almost
immediately withdrew it. Something winked with a diamond glitter on her finger
and then vanished.

“Come,” Hera said to Lady Gotrocks, who turned away from the
railing with obvious reluctance. I noticed her eyes were red-rimmed. “Your
name?”

“Cecile . . . Schuyler.” The hesitation before the last name
sounded odd. Suspicious? Definitely hauteur. When Hera imperiously shook the
lotus bag (the leaves actually rustled) Cecile reached in with the air of one
about to touch an extremely dead fish. She gave a little gasp, pulled her hand
free, and wrung it.

“Hephaestus, Herakles,” Hera said to me and Cecile, then
smiled at Bettina. “And Zeus. Ah ha! Judicious choices.” That compelling voice
belled with an undertone of laughter.

Bettina rubbed furiously at her hand, her fingers sparkling
in the sun.

“The male gods,” said Hera, “have displeased me. I have
taken all their powers." She hefted the lotus bag, and the leaves
fluttered in the wind, sending out an aroma of pungent greenery. "Perforce
they must watch. Perhaps they will learn something about the exigencies of
power."

"Who’s going to teach what to whom?" Bettina
asked, still suspicious.

"You," Hera stated. "Will teach them. Long
have I listened as crones are made the butt of japes. If the fools listened to
those who have the least power yet the most wisdom, would not the world be in
better case? Prove me right."

Sunlight flashed off the seawater, dazzling our eyes. I
caught a confusion of whirling wings, and then all the noise of the pier — whose
absence I had not noticed until then — closed around us: the wash-splash of the
waves, the cry of seabirds, the chatter of tourists and the clatter of fishing
poles.

The three of us were no longer isolated. We were joined in a
shared emotion of horror, disbelief, and a complete inability to know what to
do next.

Cecile was the first to react. She turned her back on
Bettina and me and headed for the stairway to the upper level of the pier. As
she passed one of the sturdy benches looking out over the water, she hit the
back of it, either accidentally or in an expression of frustration. Then she
recoiled as a corner of the iron-bound back support about the size of a dinner
plate broke free with a loud crack and hurtled up into the air some hundred
feet, spinning crazily.

I was staring in total disbelief, so I didn’t see exactly
what Bettina did, but I sneezed as a beam of hot, electric air shot by me and
intersected that spinning piece. Light glowed around it for a nanosecond, then
vanished, leaving a puff of ash to float down to the ocean water below.

My head whipped around in an Exorcist neck twist; there was
Bettina in the act of wringing her fingers violently. Only instead of water
dripping off, light zapped, splashed, and shot around crazily in a fireworks
display that made my eyes hurt.

She froze. I rubbed my eyes as dozens of tiny fires sent
white smoke twirling lazily upward on the sea breeze.

“What the hell?”

“Hey —”

“It’s a bomb!”

The voices broke out behind me. Once again I did a Linda
Blair, in time to catch Cecile bracing her hands on that bench support as if
she were trying to will it whole again. The result? The thing broke into
splinters, and as she recoiled, her hands jerking to her shoulders, fingers
spread, the splinters shot skyward, a whole bunch of spinning shards of iron
and stone that were going to come down and cause a world of hurt.

“Halt.”

The voice, unlike Hera’s imperial ring, was soft as fog,
cooling as rain, a whisper that somehow seized time. The smoldering fires all
winked out. The lethal shards overhead reversed their trajectories in a flash,
reassembling seamlessly. The ashes even swooped up from the water below like a
clump of tiny mites, blurring together into a chunk that reattached to its
parent bench back with a definitive thok.

Cecile, Bettina, and I swung around. Another woman stood on
the steps to the upper level, wearing a golden helmet, a white peplum, and
sandals that tied up to her knees. A huge owl sat on her shoulder. She held an
honest-to-ancient-days spear in one hand. In spite of these outlandish details,
the people around us blinked, turned to one another with questions that no one
listened to, then slowly wandered away, without paying her the least attention.

She smiled at them out of a young-old face, then beckoned to
us with her free hand.

This time, Cecile didn’t try to walk away. Bettina still
looked hostile and suspicious, but she waited. I put my good hand to my scooter
joystick. When my fingertips touched the metal, a schematic bloomed behind my
eyes, and I, who could barely work a cell phone, and who could not figure out
the TV remote, saw the structure of my chair right down to the movement of
electrons. I let out a squawk, and this time the newcomer laughed out loud. It
sounded like the chuckle of a stream.

“Use the senses you have been given,” she said, snapped her
fingers, and the owl launched upward with a great flapping of wings, then poof!
It vanished, leaving behind a brief scent of cinnamon and cedarwood.

Cecile coughed, then said in a faint voice, “Excuse me.”

“Believe the evidence.”

People streamed around us as if we were not there. I
thought, this better not be another stroke. I pinched my nose. Hard. Tears
burned my eyes. The woman in the helmet — Pallas Athena? — was still there.

Bettina said, “What are we supposed to be doing?”

“Anything you like,” said Athena. “But Hera will be most
displeased if you take her gift and do nothing. She is going through the world
dispersing gifts to women like you, past the change of life.” She raised her
spear, indicating the people around us. “You know what most men would do, given
these powers.” Athena brought the spear down with a crack that reverberated
like thunder — though again, none of the people around us reacted. “Disappoint
her at your peril.”

She vanished in a wink of light.

And there we were, three totally unconnected women standing
in an uncomfortable triangle on the crowded Santa Monica Pier.

Cecile looked away, body language broadcasting her desire to
be anywhere else. Bettina the same.

Me? If I could have, I’d be whooping with amazement and
thrill; half a century ago I’d been wearing Spock ears to conventions, and
until my stroke I’d spent decades drawing wizards, witches, elves, ghosts,
warriors, and every other kind of supernatural being writers imagined. Though
at age ten I’d reluctantly given up believing I was going to find magic when
I’d rapped my last closet back in hopes of finding Narnia behind it, I’d done
the next best thing: illustrated it for comics and book covers.

Cecile said, “I can’t deal with this now.”

Bettina shrugged. “Better we should exchange phone numbers.
In case.”

She didn’t say in case of what. But Cecile nodded, and
rattled off her digits. Bettina and I followed suit, then we all separated,
them to the stairs, and I hit the joystick on my scooter, and trundled up the
ramp to head for home.

“Home” for me is a garage converted into a single-room
apartment behind a beautiful Craftsman house ten blocks inland from the pier. I
got there without mishap, plugged in the scooter, toiled through getting my
zombie half from scooter to chair, and then I sat there gazing from object to
object as I tried to get the old reality and the new to mesh. It didn’t help
when I remembered that I’d sat in exactly the same spot the day I came home
from the hospital after the stroke, trying to mesh decades of ageless labor
into the jolt of the new me. When had I turned old? Inside, I was the same age
I’d always been.