Stephen Hunter: Soft target

The bullet hit Santa Claus beneath the left eye.

It shattered his skull, blew a large exit wound from the rear of that vessel, and drove a bright red spatter pattern across the pale satin of his throne like some sort of twisted abstract painting. Worse still, the ballistic energy unleashed an upper-body spasm that shook his hat comically askew, and it slipped off his face and caught on his ear and hung there like a large red sock.

The four-year-old girl sitting in his lap stared not so much in horror but in fascination. She understood that this was “different” but had no larger context against which to compare it. She had no acquaintance yet with the concept of horror and the human fear of seeing the body’s vaults penetrated and eviscerated, but she picked up immediately on the appropriate response from her mother, who grabbed her and started screaming as the hundreds of others clustered around Santa’s throne began to do the same.

It was like combat, except the food wasn’t as good.

It was… shopping… in a mall… on the day after Thanksgiving, the blackest of black Fridays.

Ray Cruz decided that he would never take an IQ test again, for the results, after he had agreed to this adventure, would prove suicidally depressing.

He shook his head, even as someone in the crowd jostled his shoulder. That person was outbound down the corridor called Colorado-after the river, not the state-while he was inbound. His fault? Maybe, maybe not, and courteous as ever, he shot a look to his victim, issued a tiny smile of contrition, noted that it was a she and that she was under twenty and concluded that he did not register as a carbon-based life form, and turned back to what lay ahead.

What lay ahead was people, confusion, greed, stuff, the despair of the holidays, the crunch of families that did not get along, duties and responsibilities only half-articulated but completely felt, guilt and regret, endless and passionate. All that was evident in the tableaux before him, the long corridor of mall America, a place he hardly knew, lined on each side by mercantile units offering the usual treasure-jewelry, clothes, shoes, ladies’ undies, toys, a stop here and there for junk food or hooch-all of it lit through the daylight by the red-green-yellow spectrum of holiday illumination, though the temp was a steady seventy-two and the echoes that amplified the ambient noise level testified also to its indoorness. So much data, so many splendors, a multitude of faces and costumes, the range from beauty to grotesque, from health to sickness, from the very young to the very old. It was like a village bazaar he’d once seen in Afghanistan, except for the Afghanistan part. It sucked the energy out of him. He wanted to take cover. It was incoming, like an artillery barrage to the senses, 24/7. He felt his normally impassive face collapse in unwilled but undeniable melancholy.

“Hey, Marine, don’t fade on me,” Molly Chan said.

“I’m about to call a corpsman,” he said.

“Big tough guy like you? You can get through this. We’ll show up with packages and make them so happy and you’ll feel good. The nephews will all worship you, the sisters will wonder why you took me over them, my father will offer to make you a partner in his business, and my mom… well, who knows about my mom?”

It sounded pretty good to Ray. Family. It was something that had been taken from him years ago, on a highway outside Manila when a drunken truck driver hit his mother and father as they drove home from a visit with her relatives. Even discovering that his biological father still lived hadn’t quite filled the hole in his life; maybe the sprawling, argumentative, rambunctious Chan clan would.

He was forty-two now, a few months past twenty-two years of gung ho, Semper Fi USMC lifestyle, mostly shooting and getting shot at. Ray had many scars from distant, dry or cold places, and he had many memories that sometimes-less now than before-flooded over him: men and boys bleeding out or torn to pieces, the dysentery of fear, the yoke of duty, his own need to press on and finish, even if it finished him. What’re you trying to prove, Ray? Achilles died a million years ago. Someone’s going to put an arrow in your heel too, if you don’t watch out.

I’m Hector, not Achilles, Ray had replied, knowing the difference.

But then, in the Washington area for a talk at one of the alphabet-soup agencies that sought his postretirement employment, he had met Molly Chan, and maybe it would all change, maybe it would be better after all. It had been, of all places, another gigantic mall, one out in Northern Virginia.

“You look like you’re about to cry,” someone had said to him as he stood at the corner of Macy’s and Lord amp; Taylor’s, baffled as to direction and destination.

He turned; she was more Asian than he was, shorter than he was, and unlike his dead flat desert of a face, adept primarily at staying neutral while people tried to kill him, hers was lively, lit from within by intelligence and wit. And she had “You have cheekbones,” he said.

“One on each side. They won’t go away no matter how much I eat.”

“I’m half-Asian,” he said.

“I noticed both halves,” she said. “I bet it’s a long story.”

“Longer than Tolkien. Denser too. But at least-no hobbits. Anyhow, yeah, I am about to cry. Why did I come here? It’s like the end of the world. I just need some underpants.”

“You’ve never been in a mall before?”

“Possibly. I’m not sure. I’m just out of the Marine Corps, twenty-two years. They may get you killed, but they do hand out free underpants.”

She laughed at his little joke, and that was a kind of start. It turned out they got along, their rhythms were right, they agreed on who the world’s assholes were, they didn’t like pompous, overbearing, self-important people, they believed in hard work, modesty, repression, and honesty. Neither drank a lot, both drank a little. Both were embarrassingly smart. What could possibly go wrong?

First it was coffee, then it was a couple of meals, a number of enjoyably merry e-mails, then a really bad movie, and then some interesting stuff happened and here he was in suburban Minnesota, at the biggest mall in America-America, the Mall, it called itself, and everywhere you looked stood the three letters AtM-on the biggest shopping day of the year. He was visiting her parents and family, headquartered in nearby Saint Paul, and on this day, the Chans went shopping en masse.

The family was Hmong, that is, formerly mountain tribal Vietnamese, honorable and ferocious allies of the American war effort of the ’60s and ’70s, since (by political necessity) decamped to the upper Midwest. She was second-generation, had only been to Asia as a tourist. She was thirty-four and an attorney in Washington, at the Department of Energy. She was beautiful, too good for any man she’d ever met, and even now unsure why she had spoken to the trim guy in the mall looking for underpants but glad she had. He remained vague about his past, not knowing that at a certain time, before she got in too deep, Molly had called in a DC favor and had received a synopsis of his career highlights, all five tours in the suck, and the last, crazy ride to hell and glory that ended in that famous missile detonation at the Rose Garden.

“Now,” he said, as they were carried along by the current of the torrential second-floor Colorado corridor, “are we at this spot by random drift or is there a conscious destination ahead?” On either side, stores came and went: Ann Taylor, InvisibleSHIELD by Zagg, LEGO Imagination Center, Impulse, Lee’s Video Gallery. And everywhere lights, green and red, Christmas trees, elves, Santas, the whole nine yards of Christmas cheer braying psychotically at the innocent and the easily disturbed.