B. CRAIG GRAFTON - PAYING FOR THE WALL

​Author is a retired attorney having practiced for 35 years in Illinois who now lives in Texas and started writing stories about a year and a half ago.

Paying For The  Wall

​ 
     Don K. Haughty was the ruler of his kingdom. He had got elected as such by promising to build a wall between his kingdom and the kingdom to the south, the kingdom of Senior Max Amigo. He further had vowed that the he would make Max Amigo pay for it, the cost of the wall that is. Needless to say, the two were not friends.
    So fearful that he would make an ass of himself if he didn’t keep his campaign promise, Don K. began constructing the wall.
    Max Amigo defiantly laughed at Don K.Haughty. “You are on a fool’s errand,” he taunted. “The windmills of your mind must not be turning for we will never pay.” Max Amigo wanted no wall to be built for he viewed an open border as a safety valve, that is a solution, for all the problems of his kingdom that he could not fix.
     Don K. Haughty paid no attention to this bravado for such boasting was typical of Max Amigo. Just more southerly hot air he thought.  So he charged onward and as said, he began construction. Or so he said he did. But there was nothing there to see, no great impressive wall like the Great Wall of China, no drab concrete barb wire topped wall like the Berlin Wall, nothing but a few antenna towers spaced intermittently along the entire border. That is certainly not a wall thought Max Amigo.
    Then one day Don K.Haughty announced, “The wall is done and now Max Amigo it is time that you paid for your haughtiness.”
     Max Amigo looked across the border. His view was unobstructed. “Pay for what,” he laughed. “There is nothing there. I see no wall.”
    “Oh but it is a magic wall,” bragged Don K.Haughty. “You can not see it but it is there all the same. Trust me.”
    “Trust you. Ha!” I will prove that no such ‘magical wall’ exists. Max Amigo then ordered his faithful servant, Poncho Sanza, to cross over the border and walk through this invisible wall into the Kingdom of Don K. Haughty.
    Poncho Sanza was a trusting but scared soul as he approached the wall. He believed in magic and hesitated one step short of the border wall.
    “Do it!” ordered Max Amigo for he did not tolerate disobedience from his peons.
    More scared of Max Amigo than of magic Poncho Sanza stepped forward and instantly  was zapped to Jesus, like a bug zapped by a bug zapper, nothing remained of him anywhere. He was gone.
    “See the wall is magic like I said,” boasted Don K.Haughty. “It will zap all you pesky blood sucking mosquitos that try to cross it.”
    Max Amigo hesitated. He thought it politically best not to order another of his servants into the ‘wall’ that wasn’t there.
     Don K. Haughty chuckled to himself. The wall he had built was a star wars wall. The technology thereof had been developed and used against a former enemy of his kingdom, by a former ruler of the kingdom, many years ago. So Don K. Haughty decided to employ it here too. It had cost him nothing since it already existed. Nevertheless he hollered back to Max Amigo, “Now you will pay.”
    Maximus Leon Amigo defiantly roared back, “We will never pay.”
    But alas poor Max Amigo paid dearly. For now the peons of his kingdom were unable to leave a life of grinding poverty, drug cartels, and overcrowding. They could not flee to the north to  a better life since the wall would certainly kill them. So they were doomed. Yet they continued to breed like bunnies exacerbating the problem as they were not genetically programmed like lemmings to kill themselves when their numbers got too large. And as for the criminals of the country, they could no longer escape justice by fleeing north. So they stayed and wreaked further havoc on the denizens of the kingdom. Nor could the drug dealers move their merchandise now, for it was certain death to try to cross the border. So they were forced to sell their drugs, at lower prices, to the peons. This was because the peons, though they craved the drugs for the illusionary temporary escape that it provided them, had very little dinero to spend on drugs. Thus the price dropped and the drug dealers became poorer too.
     And all this turmoil roiled, boiled and broiled throughout the kingdom of Max Amigo and at the next election he got blamed for the wall and everything else that was wrong in the kingdom. And through local, state, and national crooked elections, crooked without help from any foreign government one might add, it was assured that the now unpopular and hated Max Amigo was removed from office.
     And during the whole time all this was happening, Don K. Haughty brayed, “See Max Amigo, I told you that you would pay.”