A Small Price to Pay

“Bang, Bang!”1

That was the sound of a revolution.2

It was the sound which had turned the city to dirt and the fields to ash; the sky to a screen which soiled the rain. It was the sound that shocked the sun into shining a wartime red, and roused the black horse to trot solemnly amongst the barren gardens. It was the noise the people with gaunt eyes heard as they stared and chewed upon leather inside of patchwork hovels and nevertheless, lived. 3

The sound of war.4

But even in the midst of the treacherous times, there, in the streets, was jolliness, a racing, a gamboling flurry! Dirty feet like the crusts of a desert and waving, electric hair. Down brown paths and through scorched yards, it was a merriment of juvenile soldiers fighting and dying theatrically, open mouthed, tongues hanging out like filleted worms just for a moment, and then popping back to life again. They ran, spraying spittle from machine-gun mouths and mimicked the sound of bombs with their voices as they chased and retreated and ended war after war with piping, monosyllabic parleys. Then start over again; Ka-boom, Ka-bang! It was from the lungs of these, young children, most under nine, none older than eleven, who barely understood the pains created by the grown-ups and changed those sounds of fear into their own boisterous game.5

“Bang, bang.” Laughter!6

Someone died and someone else had killed him, and then they all ran on, up a hill and around the group of trees that wilted in the haze like celery stalks in a great wide face; the boy Mark Wallace at the head of the bunch. He was seven and small for it, with more holes in his clothes than there were clothes themselves and every inch a dirty cannonball rushing forwards with bright white teeth shining through his mask of dust when he laughed. He threw a grenade and pantomimed the explosion with his arms. Boom! The others dodged the shrapnel with incredible aerial twists of their bodies, landing sprawled this way and that in the dirt and made a barrage of their own. Then it was up and on to somewhere else. A wooden fence was a tangle of barbed wire to crawl under; a driveway was a stream to span in a single leap, lest you be eaten by the sharks! They jumped; they ran on.7

This exuberant noise was the only noise in the whole quiet city; hundreds of brown buildings and brown houses standing still on brown sand with their people inside, hearing the wind blow in the echoes from other cities, miles away. The sounds of horror and bombs searching for a new place to land carried on the breeze, the grumble of engines, the flying hogs, their guts filled with deadly packages, the boots stamping in single file. The city listened; it waited. All of its men had been stolen away months ago to fight for one faction or the other, and now, across the continent, half of them marched in a victorious new order declaring that the world had become a renewed dawn as the evening sun glinted crimson off of their metal hats, traveling from city to city and claming each as a member to this restored, perfect earth. Half of the men strutted homeward in victory, the other half lay forgotten in a wasted field somewhere, as half the city waited in hope, the other in fear; all of them in silence.8

The red sun began to sag in the sky, and the warm breezes noticed the change, bringing the distant sounds a millimeter nearer.9

Mrs. Wallace, Mark’s mother, stood at the kitchen window overlooking the city and the hill on which the boys played their game. She bustled about cooking the scant remains of food left for the night’s supper, humming a song that had been all but lost in the passing years. Often the activities of Mark and the neighbor kids escaped her attention entirely, but now she allowed herself a momentary reverie to watch the children, like a small stampede of wildebeest rushing wild over the savannah. First, out of sight, came the boisterous noises and shouts, then twenty grimy hands and faces parading in disarray. There was Mark, and she recognized Eli and Quinn, whom the kids called “grub” when the adults weren’t listening, and also Big Jim, eleven years old and looking thirteen, who dropped dead beneath the windowsill as he ran with a spectacular scream.10

“War’s over!” He cried suddenly.11

The rest of them paused in the midst of their melee, halfway between sword thrusts and ammunition reloads. They hollered. “Why?” 12

“They dropped an atom bomb and now everyone’s dead.” 13

There came a mutinous grumbling from most of the brigade until everyone realized that this allowed for the greatest bit of destructive play-acting yet, so they all obliged with drawn-out wails of jovial death. Everyone died happily, and Jim got back to his feet amidst the carnage as a general, announcing the next violent scenario.14

“Now you and me and Piercey and Jack over here,” he said, pointing out his chosen squad “we’re gonna be the revolutionaries.”15

“What’s vo-lutionaries?” Mark asked.16

“Revolutionaries, ninny.” Jim laughed and savored the chance to illuminate the others as the gang of younger children gathered around him. Jim was large for his age, an only child; he enjoyed leading the smaller ones in imaginative games which would have become bouts of disintegrating chaos otherwise. “They’re the normal people like you and me who gather up guns and kitchen knives and things and get together to attack the government because it’s oppressive.”17

“Pressive, man!” Mark said. “You use too many big words.”18

“He likes thinkin’ he’s smart,” said someone, “Cause he’s the oldest.” 19

“Nah,” said Big Jim wisely. “My pa told me, it’s like what’s happening now. People start not likin’ the way things are and they make their own army to attack the government’s army.”20

“Why?”21

“Cause things ain’t right, my pa said, back before he left. He said that the government don’t care about nobody. They started the war by starvin’ everybody, and serves ‘em right that people got mad and started killing ‘em back. Pa said anyone who likes the old government should all get hanged”22

“What’s ‘hanged’?”23

Eli chimed in with glee, “Strung up! Choked! You know, like in the old movies with the men and their hats. Good guys catch the robbers and if no one shoots the rope out, then gaackk!” He made a throaty gargle with his hand curled up around his neck and bulged his eyes out like a squeezed balloon. Everybody laughed.24

“Nobody does that nowadays though.” Jim said. “You’ll just get shot instead.” He made a thumb-and-finger motion with his hand around the circle of soldiers. Pew! Pew!25

The children chortled and hollered and then at a single command they suddenly became like ants scattered about the crusty dirt, scrambling on six legs with no real mind behind their moves. Noise happened. There was still a sun in the sky; it and Mrs. Wallace watched the warfare like a stage play seen too many times – they could almost quote the lines! 26

Overhead, that is, over the sink and the kitchen window that was a picture frame holding the whole hill and the city of smog smudged onto a brown piece of crinkled canvas paper inside of it, that is where there was a clock hanging precariously from a crooked nail. Ms. Wallace looked at it and she could read it – even though it was one of those silly, obsolete clocks; the sort with the numbers arranged stupidly in a circle that only could count the time up until midday and then had to start all over again if it were to catch the rest of the hours in its hands. Small arrow: five; big arrow: twelve, with another single spoke on the wheel spinning and spinning, round and round and going nowhere, forever, past the twelve, one, two, three, around and past the twelve again, twice, three times. 27

Like an old man on a bicycle, Mrs. Wallace thought, only this bicycle is tied to a pole with a rope so that instead of moving forward the old pedaler huffs and puffs on his wheels, orbiting around and around the stake; retracing his track all the day long and then, when his gears reach the six, he’ll be calling for his supper. Time in a wheel. Strange, even though it’s what happens every day: a city full of hungry stomachs begins rumbling just as the tips of shadows barely touch the next house in line and red lines on the square clocks make a one and a seven and a three and a zero. Then the shadows grow a foot or two, and they must touch something! Some button that propels the wives, like a row of metallic maids, to march to their ovens and pull out pans of steaming mash which walks onto spoons, transports into mouths, squishes between chomping, white stones, falls down throats into black-hole stomachs and finally everyone is happy for a while. Then again, the next day, and the next, the next! A stunning repetition, as if everyone had forgotten what had happened the last time the sun stood at that same point in the sky. Hours, like days and seasons and everything. But what would happen if, one day, someone decided to ignore the gut-rumbles, or sat idly to watch the shadows stretch further and further and not care how far their fingers reached?28

Or, what if everyone did?29

Chaos, Ms. Wallace realized, and slid some mash into the oven. The old man made another senile rotation.30

There was a loud jangle some minutes later, like violent holiday bells, and that meant someone was paging on the telephone. Ms. Wallace set down a paper-back story and lifted the clamoring thing off its hook.31

“Evening, Mary!” called a voice through the robot wires of the apparatus. “How are things on your side of the rusty old road?” 32

The sounds were packaged, removed from boxes that had escaped valiantly from a mouth into the holes of another phone, somewhere else. They had sped like particles of sand down a string of wire running like a river underground, beneath the street and through the roots of houses and trees, and then had finally been deposited into a speaker that blared at the opening of an ear: a cave echoing the boxed-up words and shaking them loose. Amazing! 33

“All’s well here, Marty” Ms. Wallace said back into the stream as she took a glance out the window to see if anything had changed. Nothing had. “Dinner’s cooking itself. And you?”34

“Oh! Good, good,” Marty, Mrs. Grillon fluttered, her prim, golden locks almost visible in her voice. “Say, you haven’t seen Jim about have you? It looks like I’ve gone and misplaced him again.” There was a chuckling sound from the speaker, a barrage of electronic laughter. “Seems like boys can be harder to find than a pair of matching socks after wash day. Who knows where they go off to?” 35

“Not to worry, he’s with Mark,” Ms. Wallace replied. “They and a whole gang of gremlins are off stomping about like tyrannosauruses. They’re playing war, I think. Boys and their bombs!”36

“Again! Sometimes I wonder if it’s prudent to let them play at that, you know, with times as they are nowadays.”37

Mary Wallace shifted her body and stretched her stiff neck out like a chicken at the guillotine in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the rascally warriors. There they were, flies on the horizon, buzzing banter back and forth. “As prudent as it is in peacetime, Marty, don’t you worry,” she said, watching her young progeny go down in a flurry of gunfire. “Take away their new worlds to conquer and they’ll just begin conquering countries that already belong to someone else. I can remember my brothers and their lackeys playing the same thing, wars and death and glory and such, only they played as cowboys and horses rather than fighter jets and ten-ton explosives. Times change, but children don’t much.”38

“I wonder, what is it that they’ve got to fight about?”39

“Nothing at all until they decide that they want to fight, I think! Reasons are secondary to a good, solid war. Have you heard anything from John lately?”40

John Grillon, David Wallace. Those were names that had been without faces for a long enough time to become barely more than memories. The women remembered, but the floors, the walls? Surely they had forgotten the men who had built them.41

“Yes!” Mrs. Grillon rejoiced. “Just this morning the news was saying, well, we’ve all known that the battlefront has been pushing closer to the city every day, but the man on the television said that they could be here as early as tonight and John’s company is supposed to be with them! Of course nobody knows for sure, but I thought I saw flashes breaking the horizon on yesterday’s eve.”42

Like a timely rider in the pony express, a single jet roared over the tin roofs of houses with the blast of a furnace and a scream from a horrible throat. The city shuddered.43

“Oh, the hope of bombs.”44

“Now come, Mary, don’t be that way. You know you can’t be talking like that when the tanks are rolling through town.”45

“Can’t I?”46

A mile away, Ms. Wallace heard someone she couldn’t see stand to her feet with fleshy hands perspirating upon a flowered apron. “We’ve said this all before, you know.” the unseen mouth prattled. “And I’m still saying the same thing. I can understand you’re skeptical, especially since David…well, he was…” 47

“He was killed.” Ms. Wallace mourned as she closed her eyes to picture some other place, in another time that was not so bleak or bare. But in all the views of space and time she could not remember one in which David Wallace lived. He died now, gone; he died then, lost. He has been dead forever.48

Someone was still speaking. “…and he was fighting against the New Order! I’ll never in my life understand that. Why would one fight for a despot?”49

Mary, squinting though her cloudy eyes, brushed away a spider web near the sink with her free hand and sent a small undesirable scuttling erratically across the countertop. “He was not fighting for a despot,” she wavered as she searched for the thing with her ominous hand.50

“We, everyone, was starving!” Ms. Wallace heard as she swatted at something quick and black. She missed. “What else could they have been but tyrants?”51

“We were hungry, not starving,” she replied, “at least not before the war actually happened. I wasn’t, and you certainly weren’t, I know; you’d just heard of people who were. Once in a long while the problem isn’t that of the king’s, but of the people’s! Martha, do you want a look at the real tyrant? Look no further than the face plastered to your mirror, who wakes up every day and asks: ‘what spoil can I get my hands on today? How can I make my rapacious self happy? What does this wretched world have to offer me?’ Never mind the dying man outside. But it seems as if when we people have freedom, what we really want is to feel oppressed just so that we have someone else to blame.”52

Silence. Thin seconds of it. Then finally, a programmed response from the phone:53

“I just hope you’ll see someday the hope this New Order gives us, everyone,” it said, “for one and for all. Even you can’t deny the goodness of hope, Mary.”54

Hope, Ms. Wallace wondered. Power is rarely synonymous with the word hope, no matter who is saying it. As long as hope rests in the hands of humanity, hope, it seems, will fail. She looked beneath her and found the frantic spider with her foot; it crumpled like plastic in a fire.55

“We’re running in a circle,” Ms. Wallace sermonized, her eyes moving upwards to the area above a living picture frame, “and we can’t see the other side. I wonder when your New Order’s not so new, who’ll be waiting around the next curve?”56

The words bounced back off the telephone and chattered in her ear.57

The shadows put on inches; a thousand mashes slid back out of their ovens.58

“Mom!” cried a waist-high voice from somewhere outside.59

Others: “Ms. Wallace!”60

Ten blustery faces on twenty pockmarked feet stormed up to the windowsill along with a cloud of dust. The sun’s angle made them into ten half-moons hidden behind dirty masks of clouds; one was nearing tears.61

“Yes?” Ms. Wallace said through the open window, over the crusty tap. 62

There were voices like a cyclone, as all ten of the boys shouted to have their opinions heard over the others. A parliament! The arbiter folded her arms and leaned over the windowsill to breathe in the dusty evening air, smelling of sweat and battle and, mostly, boys.63

“What,” Ms. Wallace enquired of them, “makes you think that I can understand any one of you in this clamoring mess?” 64

They pondered this.65

“That’s better,” she said. “Now who will volunteer to enlighten me as to what your quarrel is all about?”66

Quinn immediately took the stand: “Jim’s not playing fair!”67

Jim and four others reacted suddenly to defend his honor as the rest cried out his many transgressions like hatted newsies on the corners of the street. Fingers pointed, faces reddened, and Ms. Wallace stood on her feet, feeling the sun on the tops of her hands and at the tip of her nose. Children, she thought. 68

Finally, everyone paused to take a breath, and Ms. Wallace stole the moment to interpose. “Mark,” she ordered the smallest one, “tell me what’s been going on.”69

The boy began, timidly. “Jim and the rest have been the vo-lutionaries the whole time, and it’s not fair. It’s our turn to be the vo-lutionaries.”70

Again, an uproar!71

Ms. Wallace silenced it with a snap. “Boys,” she said, “your mothers are calling you and it is time to go home.”72

And like that, the revolution was over. The army grumbled and turned their faces homeward, kicking rocks with scuffling steps the entire way.73

The sun drew closer to the horizon, and beside it, a flash like another, younger sun happened upon the ground.74

“You weren’t fighting like a rascal, were you?” Ms. Wallace interrogated her young renegade after the last patch of ratty hair had disappeared down the dirty road.75

“No, ma.”76

“That’s fine then, come on inside.”77

The boy kept his small voice and his feet rooted inside of their footprints. “Ma?”78

“Yes?”79

“How come Big Jim always has to have everything the way he wants it?”80

“Because he’s a child, dear,” the woman explained, “and some children learn later than others that this world is much, much bigger than they are. Unbelievably bigger.” She paused for a sigh. “And some children never learn that.”81

“And ma?” The boy asked again.82

“What is it?”83

“How come everyone always has to fight?”84

“Time for supper,” Ms. Wallace said.85

Later, the sky was dark, but not as dark as it should have been. The news-man had been right; there was an army in the city tonight, and the deepness of the heavens was squelched in a fiery glow. Fire and weapons, bombs and war! Every horrid picture from the television was joining the city in the dark; a nightmare so real that it dulled the senses and fear so ripe that it rose like putrid smoke in the air. Gunfire, animal screams! Ms. Wallace huddled in the basement with a precious parcel wrapped tightly in her protecting arms; the bundle shuddered with the shakes of the earth.86

“Are we going to die?” A muffled voice squeaked.87

Ms. Wallace didn’t know.88

“No son,” said she. “We aren’t going to die. Don’t be afraid; it will be over soon.”89

She stared transfixedly at the small slit of a window across the tomblike room for what may have been hours, watching the flashes like great, sporadic lightning bugs playing a tremendous game in the night. Like the gods of thunder and lighting locked in a fierce competition of destructive might. Let it be over, the woman pleaded. Finish your war and then we will all get back to our lives little by little until we eventually wonder if anything ever happened at all. Turmoil has made us hold the little we have with a bit more gratitude, but soon we will lose it all in this absurd brawl. 90

Yet what of injustice? She countered herself. What of terrible power? Should it be allowed to run like a plague over the helpless people? No, certainly not. But then who is to be the judge of nations? What imperfect people can solve the sin of a world?91

A colossal carousel, we are. Unable to put a foot out and stop the spinning.92

Suddenly, an explosion like a clap of thunder between the ears sent her thoughts sprawling out of her mind. It was unbearably loud, brighter than the crimson sun itself! And then, like a cosmic flip of a switch, all was silent: for a second, a minute, even for an hour.93

The scuttling of a spider; the ticking of a clock.94

Over?95

Yes, the silence said. There was a rattle against the windowpane, but it came only from a gentle evening breeze. 96

Like mice, the two tiptoed up the stairs. Like adolescent eavesdroppers, they put their ears against the door to hear any reticent whispers beyond. Nothing! The heavy basement door slid open in trepidation.97

Lungs filled themselves with anguished air.98

But no! Everything was as it should have been. No gaping holes where walls used to be, no incinerated remains of an abode; the house stood still and strong. And out the window, nothing. Soft incendiary glows and darkness; the shadowed movement of uncountable people. Did the rest of the city stand? Ms. Wallace led Mark by the hand; they sat on a great lump where the couch usually stood, perhaps to wait the long hours ‘til morning. 99

The telephone rang!100

Mary Wallace’s hand jumped to it like a jackal before she could wonder that it was still working. Who is there? Who is alive?101

Martha Grillon.102

“Mary,” came the sound, but awful as if from a rigid, stone mouth. “Is that you?”103

It was!104

“You’re not hurt?” the stone voice asked again, and Mary marveled at its strangeness.105

“Martha, what’s wrong?”106

The stone dissolved into a waterfall, a sudden howl as if from a tortured throat. Sobbing; the woman was stricken with tears!107

“Martha!”108

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” wept the distant voice, a screaming, hysterical regret! “They came into my house, stomped about in their boots with their big guns – they asked me, I don’t know why they asked me – I’m sorry, sorry!”109

“What did you do?”110

“They asked, with their barrels they asked! Did I know anyone who was with the enemy? Was there a name I could give of someone who had fought or spoken against the New Order? Mary, I was frightened – so scared – and I told them…I told them!” The wails melted to hysteria.111

“Told them...told them what?” Mary pleaded back into the phone. “Martha, what did you tell them?”112

Mary Wallace asked, but Mary Wallace already knew, and she felt an iron glove grasping her chest. Fear, much more real than the fear of distant bombs, took her. Fear like an animal.113

“I told them about you, just to make them leave!” cried the grieving patriot in the other house. “They’re coming, and now it’s too late. I’ve done it!” 114

“Martha…” Mary Wallace appealed again.115

But there was only a final wretched moan and then the wires carried no more voice; the speaker was dead in her hand. She let the phone drop; it swung limply on its cord.116

“Mom?” someone small said. 117

Three sharp knocks at the door, hard like a judge’s gavel! There was breathing on the doorstep, so close that droplets of water formed upon the peephole. Sweat stinking like butchered meat hanging on lines in the hot, steaming sun seeped around the hinges. Mary Wallace slumped back onto the wilting couch.118

The door creaked and let the nighttime in.119

The boy Mark Wallace clutched his mother tight.120

Two boots shook the floor and then stopped; a man a mile high stood over them, breathing down months of battle and stench.121

A long rod of deathly metal hovered in the air.122

“Have you come to be my executioner?” Mary Wallace queried the silhouette, somehow suddenly brave. As brave as the dead.123

“I have,” replied the stench, as a flicker of light illuminated its face. A young man! Much too young for a garrotter; even too young for a father. With bright, intelligent eyes under a bush of disheveled hair. This was not the calloused wardog she had expected, nor the glorified trenchman making a farcical adventure out of death! Ms. Wallace gaped widely at this young boy dressed up in soldier’s clothes.124

“You’re so young,” she stammered, insignificantly.125

“Yes.” He replied, the weapon still pointing idly towards the floor. 126

“And you’re a killer.”127

The boy said nothing, his face a blank wall. A harrowing scream came from somewhere outside. But in the house there was a standstill, three bodies still and sweating out steam or heat or fear.128

“Why?”129

Why do you kill? Why do you destroy? What makes your hands glad to carry that power to let live or let die?”130

There may have been a second of uncertainty as the boy stood tall and statued. There may have not.131

“The New Order is hope,” the boy explained simply. “It’s peace and prosperity for all peoples. It alone is a light in this awful coal-blackness. It’s that for which I kill. The New Order brings a long-lost justice to a long-lost world.” He paused to hear what he had said, and, approving, began fingering copper tubes into the rear of his weapon. Light flashed again, and Ms. Wallace’s eyes noticed the blood making gloves for his dirty hands.132

This was no boy at all!133

Something metallic clicked; a small body shuddered. Ms. Wallace cowered, frantically searching for a word – any word at all to keep the next moment at bay! She begged of the man, “What sort of peace can come from killing?”134

The soldier blinked and opened his eyes. He brought himself taller, stretching another mile closer to the ceiling and moved his terrible mouth. “What sort peace of can there be if there are those kept alive who refuse to be peaceful?” he countered, shrewd as a two-tongued snake. “Yes, we have promised peace, and we intend to deliver it. This is a killing to end all killings. A war to finish wars.” He brought his arms level with his chest, and with them came the ugly metal, its long, hollow nose looking down with disdain and two eyes lurking behind it, cold and machine.135

Ms. Wallace gasped and clutched the shaking boy to her breast. She offered a single, final plea.136

“I wish you wouldn’t.”137

“I don’t like it any more that you do, ma’am,” the other said. “But it’s a small price to pay for perfection.” 138

His forefinger tightened slowly upon metal as on the wall behind him, drawing a halo for his head, an old man traversed upon his forever circle, up and down, up and down, around and around, marking his cyclic path for all eternity.139

Bang, Bang. 140