“Why is it called ‘mooning’?” I asked.
“Well, what does it look like? Look at the light hitting it. Doesn’t it look like a moon?”
It did. It looked like a moon. And now, literally sniffling for dear life to keep my nose above the muck, my head tilted so that my eyes were forced to look straight up, what I saw rising over the horizon and coming towards me, looked like nothing so much as a moon!
Although daylight was deepening into dusk, it still seemed too early for the moon to be coming up. But where the practice of mooning is concerned, it’s never too early. As the “moon” sped closer, I recalled that incident on the New York Thruway and was able to identify it for what it was.
Heading my way, flying upside down, was an old-fashioned biplane. It looked like a Spad, or a Fokker, or any of those other double-winged two-seaters they used in World War One. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see the Red Baron hanging upside down from the cockpit.
But there were no features to this moon visage. It was strictly a nether-face belonging to a daredevil aerial gunner out mooning just for the hell of it. In front of the “moon,” also hanging upside down, was the pilot of the biplane. I couldn’t see his face because the top wing was in the way. Thus I had no choice but to direct my plea for help to the rudely naked posterior hedge-hopping towards me.
“HE-L-L-LUP!” I screamed succinctly, the nostril of my unblocked nasal passage quivering with the effort to slay above the muck.
The “moon” was eclipsed. A Slavic face framed by fierce sideburns replaced it. The plane circled and then glided towards me, still upside down. The mooner shouted something down at me.
I recognized the language as Russian. Unfortunately, I don’t savvy Russian, and so I was unable to translate the words he was shouting. Still, I could imagine the sense of them from his tone. I guessed he was yelling something like, “What the hell are you doing in the middle of a quicksand bog, you idiot?”
“HE-L-L-LUP!” I explained in reply to the question.
If my response didn’t satisfy his curiosity, at least it prompted him to action. The plane circled again and when it was directly overhead, the mooner dropped me a rope. He’d attached one end to the craft’s fuselage. The other end I grabbed onto with both hands.
None too soon. My nostril had just inhaled the first grains of quicksand. Now, as I was lifted out of the bog with a jerk, I was able to suck air into my lungs through my mouth. With my sinuses, it was a real relief.
“Thanks,” I yelled up at my rescuer gratefully.
The answer I received was a torrent of Russian invective and a disgusted wave of the mooner’s arm. As if to punctuate his contempt for me, he reversed his position in the plane and once again his bare bottom hung out. Holding onto the rope for dear life, I sailed over the snow-covered countryside and gazed up into the deepening dusk at the moon hanging over me.
Just about the time my armpits started sending signals that the strain of holding onto the rope was too much for them, the moon disappeared once again and was replaced by the mooner’s face. He was waving his arms and shouting something at me. The words sounded like a Cossack complaining that his borscht was too cold.
“What did you say?” I yelled back in English.
“Dissborschkastukoal!” he yelled back.
“I’ll tell the cook to heat it up,” I mumbled to myself in frustration.
After a bit more of this, I finally perceived what he was trying to tell me. Either because it was getting dark, or because we were running out of fuel, or a combination of both, the plane would have to land soon. It couldn’t land upside down with me dangling from it. Even if it tried to land right side up, I’d be smeared over the runway. Therefore, they were going to drop me before they landed. The mooner indicated a grove of trees and I realized that they intended to come in low over it and that I was supposed to let go of the rope and hope the branches would cushion the shock.
“So long and thanks for everything,” I called. “Happy mooning,” I added. “Here goes nothing,” I told myself as I let go of the rope and aimed myself towards a bower of cushy-looking pine branches.
The trouble was, the branches were more needly than cushy. Also, while they broke my fall, they weren’t strong enough to stand up under my momentum. I plowed a path down the trunk of the tree like a descending rocket, picking up pine needles all over my torso until, by the time I hit bottom, I resembled a porcupine.
If I’d hit the ground, I might have broken my neck. Fortunately, the second stage of my fall was broken by a man stooping over at the base of the tree. I came down on his back and the two of us sprawled to the ground together.
“Ach! Scheisse!” he exploded profanely in German. “Dummkopf! You spoiled everything!” he added with a Westphalian lilt to his Deutsch as he scrambled to his feet and pulled a Mauser from the holster hanging under the greatcoat he was wearing.
German is one of the languages I speak, and so I savvied what he was saying. But even if I hadn’t had the literal translation at my fingertips, I won1dn’t have had any doubt about the anger behind the insults he was hurling at me. “Look, I’m sorry,” I answered him in German. “But you don’t have to be insulting.”
“Sorry! What good is sorry? A whole year at war office planning your clumsiness has made go pfffhhhtt! Schweinhund!” He cocked the revolver and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed.
“Your gun jammed,” I told him.
“Verdammt!” His face grew very red as he struggled with the gun. “This just isn’t my day!” He brought his eye to the barrel of the gun and peered down it, trying to locate the trouble. .
“Careful,” I told him. “With your luck—”
“Achtung!” He turned the gun around and pointed it at me. “It’s fixed. Prepare to die!”
“Now just a minute there, Hans-—”
“Chauvinist! My name is not Hans!”
“Oh? Sorry. What is your name?”
“Karl.”
“Okay, Karl. Now the question is, what do you want to kill me for?”
“For one year we plan to kill the most important man in Russia, their whole war effort should go kaput when he dies. Tonight comes the opportunity, I plant the bomb, and I’m just hooking it up to the detonator when you come plotzing out from the trees and shtunk up everything. You are a klutz! For this, you die!”
“Not if I have a choice.” I dived at him before he could pull the trigger and we wrestled for the gun.
“Schweinhund! You are deliberately frustrating me again!” he panted as we fought.
“Sorry, Karl. It’s just that I have this exaggerated life urge.”
“It’s about to be cured!” He backed off, aimed the Mauser at me again and started to pull the trigger.
“Debshakref!” Right on the heels of the Russian exclamation came the shot. It came just in time to stay Karl’s hand on the trigger of the Mauser. He pitched forward on his face, looking very surprised, then very dead.
I turned in the direction from which the shot had come. The man who stood there with the smoking revolver in his hand was of average size. Yet somehow he gave the impression of being huge, hulking, ominous. His face was surrounded by a full black beard which gave something of the ludicrous effect of a character out of a comic opera. But there was nothing ludicrous about his eyes. They were deep and black and piercing. Their impact was like a magnet; their effect even at a casual glance was hypnotic.