Christmas With Its Ears Cut Off - A Short Story

    In the pre-dawn darkness of Christmas morning 1978, Andy Kevels stepped quietly from the cab of his pickup truck. He slowly and noiselessly closed the Ford's door. He tightened the strap the held his hunting rifle snugly against his back and then dropped, prone, into the brown and white slush. Andy was facing an "elbow crawl" of approximately two-and-a-half blocks (counting the parking lot of Weaver's Carpet Warehouse). "Except for the asphalt, and the snow…oh, and the Buick dealership, it just like I'm back in 'Nam," Andy thought to himself.
    Andy Kevels had never actually been to Vietnam although he had been drafted and served in the Army during the Vietnam War. Andy had served his entire two-year stint assigned to a motor pool on the island of Guam.
    Methodically, Andy crawled across Medlow Street and then rolled into a drainage ditch. Lifting his head he could just barely make out the blinking lights and giant plastic candy canes that marked the perimeter of Than Quan's X-Mas Forrest some seven hundred yards to the North. Attempting to move in the slow-motion manner that he'd seen each week on "The Six Million Dollar Man"; he removed a 7 mm Remington Magnum shell (or a "7 mag" as Andy would call it.) and chambered it into the rifle. It was then that Andy realized that his breath was escaping from his mouth like steam from a locomotive. "Gonna give myself away" he thought. Instinctively, Andy shoved a handful of snow into his mouth (he'd learned this trick, not from any military training, but from an episode of "Bonanza".) and prepared to move on. From the window of her parent's house, across the street, nine-year-old Sandra Freiberger was puzzled by the visage of a man dressed in bright green "camouflage" vividly standing out against a background of white snow. "Maybe he's one of Santa's helpers", she said to her teddy bear before climbing back into bed and falling asleep.