Bats

Bats are linked to Lani Walker’s survival, self-naming, and personal talisman: in the limestone cave, a bat’s brief touch helps her recognize darkness as a refuge rather than an enemy, and later she finds the bones of a dead bat among the objects she claims for herself. In Fat Crack Ortiz’s interpretation, the encounter gives her a name and a way to understand the strength she has made her own.

The Cave Encounter

During the pitched battle in the limestone cave with Mitch Johnson, a flying bat passes close enough for its wings to touch Lani Walker’s skin. The contact is brief, but its consequence is decisive: she comes to know that the cave’s darkness can protect her. Rather than struggle against it, she can surrender herself to the darkness and be saved. The bat is thus connected not simply with the cave as a setting, but with Lani’s changed understanding of the place where she has been endangered.

Lani has not yet told anyone about the new name she gave herself after that battle. When she whispers, “Nanakumal Namkam,” she makes private a change that began in the cave and is only now being spoken aloud. The bat’s importance lies in the passage from bodily contact to knowledge: the encounter gives Lani a different relation to darkness, and that knowledge becomes part of how she understands herself.

Name and Interpretation

Fat Crack Ortiz responds to Lani’s name by calling her “Bat Meeter.” His explanation makes the naming an interpretation of her experience: she has met Bat and made some of Bat’s strengths her own. He treats this as good and asks what she thinks it means when considered together with the other things she has described. The exchange gives Lani’s private name a shared meaning without taking the interpretation entirely away from her; Fat Crack offers a reading, then leaves the question of its combined significance with Lani.

The distinction between meeting Bat and becoming Bat matters. The narrative does not describe Lani as transformed into an animal; instead, the bat becomes a source through which she can understand a strength she has acquired. Her name preserves the encounter, while Fat Crack’s phrase makes the connection between that encounter and her capacity to face the cave’s darkness explicit.

The Bat Bone as a Personal Object

On her final visit to the cave, Lani leaves her one remaining shoe as a tribute to the moldering bones of Betraying Woman. During that venture she also discovers a talisman of her own: the dried bones of a long-dead bat. The cave therefore yields two different acts of remembrance. The shoe is an offering to another figure’s remains; the bat bones are an object Lani finds for herself, carrying the significance of the encounter that helped her survive.

The later display of possessions distinguishes Lani’s objects from the items that came to her from or through Nana Dahd. Among the things she retrieved from Betraying Woman’s cave are a blackened fragment of a broken pot and a delicate bone from a dead bat’s wing. Set beside inherited sacred objects and Looks at Nothing’s crystals, the wing bone belongs to Lani’s own history. Its significance comes not from any stated use beyond being a talisman, but from its connection to the cave, the bat, and the name she has chosen.

Narrative Significance

The bat’s role develops through a sequence of concrete details: a passing touch, a new name, and a bone kept as a personal talisman. Together these details connect Lani’s survival in the cave with her later effort to give that experience meaning. The bat does not erase the danger associated with the cave; instead, the encounter changes how Lani understands the darkness within it. What had seemed an enemy becomes a possible place of refuge.

The final appearance of the wing bone among Lani’s own possessions gives that change a material form. It sits within a collection that also includes objects with their own histories and associations, but it marks something specifically hers: a strength she understands as having come through meeting Bat. Fat Crack Ortiz’s name for her and the bone from the cave thus echo one another, preserving the same connection in speech and in an object.