Soft Target Read Free

you now?” she said with a smile.
    But the going wasn’t easy, not by any means, and en masse thenormally polite and melancholy Minnesotans became somewhat bellicose. Christmas was do-or-die for them, a full-contact sport, played more vigorously than their beloved if sad-boy Minnesota Vikings had played again this season, and two exotics like Ray—Reyes Fidencio Cruz, Filipino by culture if not by birth—and Molly Chan weren’t going to stand in anybody’s way.
    They came to Skate City and he followed her in and watched mutely as she purchased a spool of bright red grit tape so that her nephew could whistle around the streets off Central Avenue aboard a mini-surfboard on jet aircraft landing gear. One look at the shaky conveyance, built for speed, guts, stamina, strong legs, and a fourteen-year-old’s lack of capacity to imagine disaster, and Ray faced his own advanced age. He’d been shot at several thousand times but a skateboard scared him to death. He’d rather face a brace of hadjis than something so lethal.
    “See, wasn’t that easy?” Molly asked.
    “Not bad,” he said. “I feel myself rallying. We are done now, no?”
    “We are done now, yes.”
    “So we can move on to other things?”
    “Unless,” she said, “you want to ride the Wild Mouse.”
    “I’d rather do another combat tour than ride that thing,” he said, as, not twenty-five yards away, the corridor called Colorado yielded to an amazing splurge of space under a wash of late-afternoon sunlight, and in the forefront of that space the single car of a roller coaster called the Wild Mouse slalomed by, shaking screams from its teenaged inhabitants. This spectacle was sited just beyond the rail of the balcony, for the mall at that location opened its central space to provide area enough for an amusement park under a vast skylight shaped to resemble a prominent map icon.
    The conceit of America, the Mall of Indian Falls, Minnesota, and the stroke of marketing genius, was that it was no simple doughnut-shaped fabrication. Its designers had contrived it to more or less resemble the shape of the continental United States, a stylized pentagonwhose morphic resonance would instantly conjure the association to America in the collective unconscious. It was correctly oriented to the compass, moreover, so that a flat, straight border was actually its northern extremity. Then a Washington-Oregon-California coastline angled downward to a San Diego corner before jutting eastward via a long, long wall engineered to form two crescents, which signified the swoops of the Mexican border and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. At that terminus, roughly where Tallahassee was located in the real world, its outer wall trekked southeasterly to form a peninsular out-crop that stood in for Florida; to complete the fantasy, from the tip of the Sunshine State to the tip of frosty Maine, a wall ran with only one bend, to honor the Atlantic-side convergence of Florida and Georgia. This of course meant that the amusement park was in the “Midwest” or center of the 750,000-square-foot immensity, and above it the skylights were patterned across the vast roof in the configuration of the Great Lakes.
    From the ground, the view yielded nothing of interest: no matter from which direction you chose to examine AtM, it looked more or less like an aircraft carrier hull dumped in the middle of the frozen Minnesota plains. That wasn’t the point, however. The whole thing had been located on the primary flight path to the Twin Cities’ great multihub international airport, so thousands saw it in its full glory every day, from 30,000 feet, as it had been imagined by its builders. Like the Pyramids, it only made sense from the sky.
    Inside, besides the corridors designated by river names and zones by compass location, it continued with a zealot’s intensity to have fun with geography. Some wit had been allowed: the multiplex movie theater—fifteen screens—was on the fourth floor of