The first break in the silence came just after Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas cast his “not guilty” vote. An angry murmur swept over the crowd. His was considered to be the crucial vote and it looked once again as if Johnson had been saved from impeachment. But I knew there was one other vote that could save the day for the Radical Republicans.
I stared at the Senator. From the gallery, he seemed calm enough-—resigned, you might say. Surely, if Heavenly had gotten to him, he would be showing some emotion at her charge of his wife’s infidelity.
Then I saw her! She was talking to the Sergeant-at-Arms guarding one of the aisles leading onto the Senate floor. Even from this distance, I could see his face turning red. He started out shaking his head, but whatever Heavenly said to him made him stop shaking it quickly enough. Finally, he ostentatiously turned his back to her. She slipped behind him and headed down towards the Senator.
He looked like a man on the verge of a heart attack when she suddenly popped up in front of him. I imagine he must have been filled with instant guilt at the thought that his own adulterous chickens had come home to roost. She evidently relieved his mind on that score. He relaxed visibly -- but not for long.
Heavenly talked urgently for a couple of minutes. Then she turned and pointed dramatically towards the gallery. Her finger zeroed in on me. The Senator craned his head, looked me in the eye, and then turned forward again abruptly as his name was called.
He bounced to his feet. In a loud, clear voice, he announced his vote. “Not guilty!” Andrew Johnson had been saved once again. He would remain in office.
The Senator turned around and stared at me once again. His look said the next order of business would be dueling pistols at thirty paces. Heavenly also stared at me. Her glance said that if the Senator missed, she’d be happy to plug me herself.
I decided it was time to leave. There was no reason to stay. Once again I’d failed to change history. Once again my action had only insured that Fate would take another wrong turn. I pushed through the crowd and walked out of the Senate gallery.
Coming through the swinging doors, I stepped smack into the middle of a Russian quicksand bog. Before I knew what was happening, I was up to my knees in Russian quicksand. Worse, I was sinking fast!
CHAPTER SEVEN
Some things you never get used to, no matter how often you experience them. Being jumped from one time and place to another by the invisible force field of a crochety Tibetan inventor’s time machine is one of those things. No matter how often it happens, even when the move constitutes a rescue from being drawn and quartered or burned at the stake, the jump is traumatic. When you’re dumped into a bog of Russian quicksand, it’s even more of a trauma. And as the quicksand rises from your knees to your waist, it gives rise to a pronounced feeling of insecurity.
I felt insecure.
The more I struggled to extricate myself from the quicksand, the deeper I sank into it. I sank slowly to be sure-—but inexorably. By not struggling, I discovered that the sinking process was slowed down considerably.
I stopped struggling.
Brains over brawn, I decided, and set about analyzing my situation. A thoroughgoing analysis determined that my prognosis was negative. By the time I concluded it, the quicksand was halfway up my chest.
I was smack in the middle of the bog. There was no chance of reaching the solid ground around it. Even if there had been a chance, it would have been difficult to extricate myself. The landscape around the bog was a snow-covered plain, bare of foliage. There was no tree branch or anything like that to grab for leverage. It was all smooth, untrammeled snow, hard-packed and frozen. All except the bog itself. Evidently the snow had been sucked into the quicksand and hadn’t had the opportunity to freeze on top of it. There wasn’t a person in sight and from the looks of the terrain it seemed pretty unlikely that a pedestrian might wander past. Like I said, prognosis negative.
The quicksand was rising over my shoulders.
“Help?” I called. In the final extreme, futility can be a way of life.
The quicksand bubbled up. My throat and neck were covered now. It crept up past my mouth, stiffling my cries. Then, briefly, I stopped sinking. The oozing was suspended, but I knew it would resume. Meanwhile, I was up to my nostrils in mud.
I don’t usually dwell on it, but I suffer from a deviated septum. What this means is that one of my sinus passages tends to become clogged. The only reason I bring it up now is that it had an unfortunate bearing on my situation. I had lo tilt my head at exactly the right angle to breathe through my left nostril.
There I was, without so much as a tube of Dristan Spray-Mist to keep that left nostril operative. There I was, a sneeze away from muddy death. There I was, and there I’d still be if it wasn’t for—
Mooning!
Mooning? Stuck in the quicksand with my left nostril pointed skyward, let me take time out for the sake of the uninitiated to define what mooning is. Mooning is the ultimate in expressed misanthropy, the utmost in antisocial behavior, the pre-Provo22 provocation flung rudely in the eyes of the world with the implicit message to all and sundry to go jump in the lake.
All clear now? No? Well then, let‘ me elaborate with an example.
Back in the 1960s, not too long before I inadvertently embarked on my tour of the centuries, I was driving along the New York Thruway one evening. With me was a friend of mine who happens to be a social anthropologist by profession. We were deep in conversation—I don’t remember what about—when the car to my right suddenly switched lanes and forced me to hit my brakes hard.
Angry, I swung into the left lane, pulled abreast of the offending auto, and proceeded to let the occupants have a piece of my mind. Then I passed them and pulled back into my original lane, cutting them off in the process. Smugly self-righteous, I felt avenged.
“Damn-fool juvenile delinquents shouldn’t be allowed to drive,” I commented to my friend, fogging over my own highway idiocy with reference to the fact that the other car was filled with kids.
“You’ve just added another mile or two to the generation gap,” my friend chuckled.
“All I did was teach those kids a lesson,” I grumbled. “Maybe they’ll remember it and think twice before they cut off the next guy.”
“And that’s what they call communication between the young and the mature,” my friend chided me.
“I think we’re about to communicate again,” I told him, spying the car coming up fast in my rear-view mirror. It pulled up on my left and stayed alongside of me. A rear window was rolled down. Inside the car, in the back, a youth propped himself up on his knees on the back seat. He lowered his pants and stuck his naked posterior out the window. The car inched up a few feet past me and drove alongside for a long time. The bare behind wiggled rudely, practically in my face. It was disconcerting, to say the least.
“There’s your communication!” My friend roared. “They’re mooning you!”
“They’re what-ing me?”
“Mooning! It’s an age-old means of expressing contempt. We find it in every time and every culture. For some reason or other, the shoving of one’s nude bottom into someone’s face is always the supreme insult. The dissident peasantry of medieval Europe used to pull it on the tax collectors. French Jacobins mooned at aristocrats. South Sea natives used it to put down the missionaries. And lately there’s been a resurgence of it in the United States. Young people today express their displeasure with society and its values by mooning indiscriminately. Sometimes they moon out of the windows of apartment buildings. Sometimes they do it from moving vehicles—trains, buses, cars. It isn’t usually used to settle a personal grudge like this, though. As a rule, it’s more generalized—-a derogatory comment for the eyes of anyone who might be shocked by it.”