“You know why I think Councilman Muckerno hates those bats so much?” she asked the crowd. “Because they’re so much better at making friends than he is! And I think they might have a better barber to boot.”

  That made everyone within earshot bust out laughing. Everyone but Councilman Muckerno, who turned as red as a beet and reached up to self-consciously check his hair. He had both a comb-over and a cowlick, and it wasn’t a flattering combination.

  Ann Richards told everyone how the bats had improved attendance at all her political rallies by eating up all the mosquitoes that had kept folks away. She also told them how the bats had already saved the state government by gobbling up the termite infestation that could’ve seriously damaged the capitol building. Finally, she said that when she became governor, she would do everything in her power to protect the bats beneath the bridge.

  “Now I want to bring up a very old friend of mine,” Ann Richards told the crowd. “Her name is Molly Ivins, and she’s learned something you should all know.”

  Molly Ivins walked up to the podium, high-fiving Ann Richards as she stepped away from it.

  “I just thought everyone here would like to know that the reason these bats showed up here in Austin in the first place is because their natural habitat was destroyed when Muckerno Limestone dynamited their cave to build a new quarry. And yes, that company is owned by Councilman Muckerno’s family. He and all his siblings and cousins sit on the board of directors!”

  There were gasps throughout the crowd. Then people began to boo and hiss at the councilman, who was beginning to squirm in his seat.

  “They also own a company called Muckerno Chemical that manufactures chemical pesticides, which farmers don’t need if there are bats around,” Molly added, pointing a finger at Councilman Muckerno. “That’s why he doesn’t want any bats around! And he’s willing to lie to the entire city to get rid of them!”

  Now the entire audience was booing at Muckerno, but he refused to leave.

  As Molly and Ann left the stage to thunderous applause, a broad-shouldered man that Opal didn’t recognize made his way to the podium. He was wearing a burnt-orange Longhorns windbreaker. Her uncle whispered that he was the coach of the UT football team. He didn’t really give a speech. It was more like he just started chewing everyone in the audience out. The same way he would a locker room full of football players for acting foolish out on the field. He didn’t even bother using the microphone. He just yelled at everyone, including the city council members up on stage with him.

  “Y’all need to wise up and leave those bats alone!” he shouted. “Didn’t anyone think this through? When football season starts in a few weeks, those bats are gonna make all of my team’s upcoming practices and games a lot more bearable by eating up the millions of mosquitoes that always show up to plague my players and all of our fans up in the stands! I can’t believe I have to come down here and explain this to all of you, like a bunch of third graders.” He pointed an angry finger at the crowd, then turned to point it at the members of the city council. “Now get your act together, all of you, and do the right thing. Or you will all incur my wrath. Got it?”

  No one said a word. You could’ve heard a pin drop. When Opal glanced around, everyone appeared to be holding their breath.

  As the coach walked off the stage, he suddenly raised his right hand and made a fist, and for a second Opal was worried he might sock someone, but instead he turned it toward the crowd to show everyone the four Bs written across his knuckles.

  “The bats belong beneath the bridge!” he shouted, and the crowd went wild.

  Just as the commotion began to die down a little, Rick Linklater emerged from the audience and walked up to the podium. He politely introduced himself as a local independent filmmaker and then told everyone how the bats had helped out the cast and crew of Slacker by bug wrangling all the mosquitoes trying to sabotage the making of their movie. Then he pointed out Opal in the front row.

  “I’d also like to thank my friend Opal there, for being our bat wrangler,” he said, raising a copy of her Batzine! high over his head. “And I also want to commend her for having the courage to exercise her First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press to do battle with our local bureaucracy and challenge the lies of their puppets in the media, by delivering the truth directly into the hands of the people. Rock on, little sister! The bats belong beneath the bridge!”

  He gave her a thumbs-up as he left the stage, and the entire audience erupted into applause. That gave Opal a big dose of courage, and before she knew what was happening, she was walking up to the podium. But when she got up there, she wasn’t quite tall enough to see over it. So she took the microphone off its stand and stepped out from behind the podium. Then she raised the mic to her lips and the words suddenly began to pour out of her. She told everyone about how the bats used to be her neighbors and how they protected all of the farmers’ crops, by eating up all the bugs intent on ruining their harvests. Then she told everyone how the bats were driven out of their previous home in the big old beautiful cave by humans with bulldozers and dynamite.

  “I think it’d be mighty cruel for y’all to force the bats out of their new home under the bridge,” Opal said, eyeing Councilman Muckerno out of the corner of her eye. “Seeing as how human greed was what destroyed their original home in the first place.”

  Then, before she left the stage, she said one last thing.

  “Besides, isn’t Austin supposed to be the city where weirdos are welcome?” she asked. “Well, what could be weirder than a whole big mess of a million beautiful music-loving bats living under a bridge downtown?”

  She raised both her fists, brandishing the four Bs scrawled across the front of each of them, and shouted, “The bats belong beneath the bridge!” as she left the stage.

  The audience burst into applause. Opal hurried back to her seat, blushing from all the compliments folks were giving her as she passed them. And when she got there, Uncle Roscoe threw his arms around her and hugged her tight. Then Maria and Elena appeared and hugged both of them.

  “We’re so proud of you, Opal,” Uncle Roscoe said.

  Before she could respond, a bunch of the people sitting near the entrance gasped. Then a lot of other people in the crowd began to jump to their feet, clapping and cheering. A few seconds later, Opal was able to see why. It was because Willie Nelson himself was sauntering up to the podium. And he was carrying his battered and beat-up old guitar, Trigger!

  Willie spent a few minutes tuning it while he told the crowd how the bats had eaten up all the mosquitoes at his annual Fourth of July picnic and that, as a result, it was easily the best Fourth of July picnic they’d ever had. Then he said he wanted to play a song the bats had inspired him to show up and sing, called “Blue Skies.”

  As soon as Willie started singing and strumming, everyone heard a commotion coming from somewhere above, high up in the rafters. It was the Clothesline Crew! The sound of Willie singing and strumming on Trigger was too beautiful for them to resist! They all took flight and began to circle above Willie, flapping their little wings in time with the song.

  For a few seconds, Opal worried the sight of the bats might cause another stampede. But it didn’t! No one screamed or ran. Because no one there was afraid of the bats anymore, thanks to everything they’d just seen and heard, and thanks to what they were seeing and hearing with their own eyes and ears right now—Willie Nelson singing a song to a dozen melomaniac bats who were dancing in the air over his head, filling up the whole place with so much mojo it was coming out all the windows.

  Willie’s song had most of the audience tearing up by the time he’d finished singing it. Including Maria and Elena and Opal and Uncle Roscoe. And Merlin Tuttle, too.

  When Willie finished singing, everyone in the audience began to cheer and applaud. Then Willie leaned into the microphone and started a chant that quickly spread through the crowd: “The bats belong beneath the bridge! The bats belong beneath the bridge!”

  Before long, every single person in the place was chanting it. Except, of course, Councilman Muckerno, who simply got up and walked out of the chamber with his head down as the crowd continued to chant around him.

  Opal didn’t know it yet, but at that moment, Willie’s chant was spreading across the entire city. Everyone listening to the debate on the radio or watching on the TV at home or in some coffee shop or record store or dance hall or honky-tonk was also starting to chant, “The bats belong beneath the bridge! The bats belong beneath the bridge!”

  For a few minutes, you could hear those words being chanted all over town.

  And the next day, when the vote was held, the people of Austin decided by an overwhelming majority to let the bats remain in their new home under the Congress Avenue Bridge forever.

  That was the moment when Opal decided she wanted to live in Austin forever, too.

  THE BIG OLD BEAUTIFUL BRIDGE

  There. Now y’all have heard the whole wild and weird tale of how a million Mexican free-tailed bats came to live under the Congress Avenue Bridge over Town Lake.

  In the months and years that followed, the bats under the bridge became the city’s beloved mascots. The mayor eventually decided to declare Austin the Bat Capital of America, in addition to it already being the Texas state capital and the Live Music Capital of the World. That seems like an awful lot of capitals for one town, but anything that makes folks happy is fine with me.

  Speaking of making folks happy, the coach of the UT football team was right. When the bats all started to show up at the stadium for the Longhorns’ home games, they would eat up all the moths and mosquitoes that would usually prevent folks from enjoying the Friday night lights. The bats were a literal game-changer, and the extra mojo they gave the team helped the Longhorns kick off a winning streak that lasted all season long. The Clothesline Crew even made friends with Bevo the Eighth, the longhorn bull who served as the team’s mascot. During home games, you could always find them hanging out with him.

  The bat colony under the bridge became one of Austin’s biggest tourist attractions. Nowadays, millions of folks come here every year, just to stand on top of the Congress Avenue Bridge and watch all those bats fly out over Town Lake each night. It’s a real sight to see. And now you can even have dinner floating on a boat while you see it, if you have the inclination.

  A few years back, the city decided to rename it the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge, after our illustrious former governor. They also decided to stop calling it Town Lake and rename it Lady Bird Lake after President Johnson’s wife. But the bats didn’t seem to mind.

  To show their love and appreciation, the people of Austin even erected a statue of a bat downtown, just a few blocks from the statues we built to honor Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

  And get this: Now, once every year, they block off traffic to the bat bridge to hold the city’s annual Bat Fest on top of it, to celebrate how much the people of Austin have grown to adore having the bats as their neighbors.

  Can you believe how things turned out? For a while there, people were seriously talking about burning the bats out from under that bridge with blowtorches and flamethrowers. Now they get treated like royalty. Because folks around here know Austin just wouldn’t be Austin anymore without all those furry little flying critters living under that big old beautiful bridge downtown.

  It has to be the only time in history that a million critters ever relocated to the center of a major American city, unintentionally terrorized its citizens, and were subsequently declared an invasive species and a threat to public health, only to end up as the city’s beloved mascots and one of its most popular tourist attractions just a few years later. I mean, where else in the world could something like this have happened?

  Only in Austin.

  In the end, Pearl and Sabine, Rainey and Red, Koenig and Lamar, Cesar and Jacinto, Trinity and Colorado, and Lavaca and Brazos all found the perfect home for themselves and their entire enormous bat family. And I can personally assure you that each and every one of them lived happily ever after.

  Don’t worry. Opal lived happily ever after, too. How would I know? Because, dear reader, as you may have guessed by now, I’m her, and she’s me. I was just telling y’all this story in the third person to keep you in suspense about how things worked out for that weird little barrel-shaped girl that I used to be. But now I don’t mind telling y’all that everything worked out for her just fine.

  After the wildest and weirdest summer any girl could ever have, I started attending O. Henry Middle School in the fall, which was the same school Elena went to. That made going there a lot less frightening, since I knew I already had at least one friend. Even so, the Clothesline Crew showed up on my first day, circling over the playground to make sure I didn’t feel lonesome during recess. But they didn’t need to worry, because I had my pal Elena with me. And once I got to know the other kids in my class a little, I discovered that most of them had a mile-wide weird streak in them, too, just like the two of us. We were all a bunch of weird kids with weird teachers at a weird school in the weirdest town in Texas. Where no one ever ends up being labeled a misfit because everyone is some sort of misfit, so all the misfits fit right in.

  Uncle Roscoe went back to school the same week I did, to study computer engineering at UT just like he’d always dreamed. He became really good friends with one of his classmates, a guy named Michael Dell, and helped him start a business building computers in his dorm room. After graduation, Uncle Roscoe went to work for him at his new company, which eventually became Dell Computer Corporation. He also asked Maria to marry him, and that was when she became Aunt Maria, and Elena and I became cousins. And when we all moved into a new house together, Mellow became our armadillo, too. The three of them made our weird little family complete.

  Merlin decided to stay in Austin, too. He founded an organization here called Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation to research and protect bats all over the world, and to help educate people about them. He inspired me to study bat conservation at UT, and after I graduated, I went to work for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Now I get paid to stand under the bridge every night at sunset and tell folks all sorts of weird and interesting facts about the bats and their unique home. It’s the best job in the world. Millions of people come here every year from all over the world to see my furry little friends fly out from under that bridge, and when they finally do, it never fails to put smiles on their faces or the bats in their good graces. It’s like some strange kind of magic that just never seems to run out.

  Elena and I have both also become minor celebrities, thanks to a popular comic strip we cocreated called Big City Bats that appears every week in the Austin Chronicle. The main characters are all based on our furry little friends in the Clothesline Crew, so they’re all local celebrities now, too.

  I’ve never seen another flying saucer. Not since that night at the farm. Not yet, anyway. I still don’t know what it was, where it came from, or why it gave me the ability to communicate with the bats. But that ability has never gone away, thankfully. I can still talk to them whenever I need to, and vice versa. I’m always going to be here for them, and I know they’re always going to be here for me. Because we’re family. And we stick together, through thick and thin, frown or grin, until we win.

  If you want my opinion, I think it was probably my mama up there with the Spirit in the Sky orchestrating everything. I think she led me to the bats, and then she led all of us to Austin. Because somehow she knew we needed one another, and that Austin needed us.

  I can’t prove it. But that’s what I think.

  I’ve changed an awful lot since those days, and so has Austin. A bunch of the people and places I mentioned in my story aren’t around anymore. But a few of them still are. The bats are still here. So is Merlin. So are Uncle Roscoe and Aunt Maria and my cousin Elena. And so am I. And all of us bat-loving melomaniacs are still living it up down here in the Groover’s Paradise. Eating all the best tacos and all the best barbecue while we listen to all the best music being performed by all the best musicians from all over the world pretty much all the time. While all our furry little flying friends under the bridge handle the mosquitoes.

  Y’all should come on down here sometime and pay us a visit.

  Little, Brown Books for Young Readers began publishing books in 1926.

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  Afterword

  After reading this “mostly true tall tale,” some of you may be wondering which parts of the story really happened and what inspired me to write it in the first place. If so, then you’re in luck, because I know the answers to both of those questions, and I’m fixin’ to share them with you right now, here in this afterword.

  I moved to Austin from my home state of Ohio in the mid-nineties, drawn by the city’s unique personality and warm climate. The small Texas town had somehow become a magnet for musicians, filmmakers, artists, slackers, and all manner of misfits, who were constantly moving there in droves from all over the state and the country. That was one of the many reasons the city’s motto was “Keep Austin Weird.”

  It seemed like the kind of place where I would fit right in, and I did. Austin quickly became my favorite city. Driving through its streets each evening, my ears were treated to all genres of music being performed by all sorts of amazing musicians from all over the world. To a guy from a small town in Ohio, it felt like I’d wandered onto the set of some kind of international multicultural jukebox musical being staged on the streets all around me—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all year long.