Achilles and the Boxer

Short Story (just the beginning)

A c h i l l e s a n d t h e B o x e r

He was only in the ring a total of seven minutes before Crazy Sophmo Jones waylaid him and he crumpled. He not only broke his jaw but cracked his skull from the cheek through the temple and around the eye into the forehead, to end in a hairline fracture on top. Everything in there started to move like Jello. The doctors didn't know what to do. How do you fix that?

Oh sure, they pinned the parts of his bones together the best they could until his head looked like a crown of thorns. But it was a toss-up if the bones would heal. For all they knew, the boxer may have to go through life looking like the Statue of Liberty.

Luckily, that very night, a local businessman by the name of Achilles who was at ringside and saw the savage crushing blow that split the boxer's head and almost sent an eye flying from its socket, suggested using an industrial grade epoxy that he had just patented and was to come on the market the following week. What made this epoxy special, was that there was absolutely no adverse human physiological reactions at all. He financed his own clinical trials and found you could put this stuff on your skin like suntan lotion. Hell, you could eat the s**t and it wouldn't hurt you, though he didn't actually recommend that. It was benign because its basic chemical structure was a natural one, the sap of the algarrobo tree from Colombia and tasted like honey. In fact, the primitive tribe there used it to make a sweet paste that they fed to the newlywed brides in a mating ritual. But Achilles put this sap through a lengthy manufacturing process whereby its sticky properties were enhanced and strengthened on the atomic level. A handful of the gunk could weld battleships. Achilles bet his epoxy could be used to glue the boxer's brains together.

The boxer hadn't much choice.

He was lying there with his head a broken eggshell and he could barely see and when he did see, it was an overlap of two nearly identical images, but separated, like a ghost image on the television. He brought up some air from his lungs and forced it though his larynx to make a throaty groan. That's how the doctors who were standing there knew he was consenting to hear Achilles' proposal.

Achilles was dressed in his best pinstripe double-breasted suit and wearing a blazing yellow tie. He always had a slim cigar holder bit between the corner of his teeth, but never a cigar. Why this was so he had never explained, not even to his closest associates. He had laid out his proposal to the boxer in his customary no-nonsense form and to the bewildered doctors who huddled in a ball like a group of easily led playground children. They didn't say much besides introduce the man. And the boxer couldn't talk with his jaw mangled like a fender in a bad accident. Achilles had the floor.

"Gentlemen," he began, "it is not my usual convention to intervene in matters afield from my own particular area of expertise. No, I am quite content in the privacy of my domain, in the sanctuary of my business, to pursue the roads of my own wild imagination, wherever they may lead, whether or not there was some product with some practical application to mankind at the end of that road or whether or not I would personally gain from it."

"However," and here he employed a two beat pause before saying, "one does not often find such an opportunity whereby a man's livelihood - my own - stands to prosper through the donation of something he himself has created, for other purposes entirely, but which may be used to benefit someone who desperately hangs on to life in a hospital bed."

Achilles walked closer to the boxer. He tilted his head and seemed to be studying him for a moment. He gave a nod, more to himself than to anyone else and then straightened up, seemingly satisfied. "Yes, you'll do nicely," he said under his breath but everyone could hear.

"You see," Achilles continued, addressing everyone in the room, "the publicity alone will burnish my image as a do-gooder and triple the shares of Achilles stock." He turned back to the poor creature lying there like some vanquished Roman god. "There is no shame in making a profit through one's generosity, my dear man, I'm sure you'll agree." And with that, he took the daring and unusual step of patting the boxer on the shoulder, loathe as he was to touch anyone beneath his social class.

Then Achilles stood over the helpless man, winding his watch. The doctors stood solemnly pretending to care.

Finally, with a definite air of authority, the businessman put his watch in his outer breast pocket and said, "Now then, I took the liberty of having mya ttorneys draw up the necessary paperwork."

He pulled from his inner breast pocket a light green folded sheaf and began opening it up. "It explains the specifics of our contract. In effect, you agree to three photo opportunites with me to publicize the success of the medical operation using Achilles Epoxy. Furthermore, Achilles reserves the right to use your image and likeness in any future campaigns. We will not be held liable for any failure of said product - although I can personally guarantee its reliability - or for such medical malpractice... and so on and so forth."

Achilles withdrew a gold pen. "Just sign on the dotted line, Mister Bruist."

Benjamin 'Bruiser' Bruist began lifting his huge right arm. It shook horribly. Nevertheless, he grasped the golden pen in his massive fingers and managed a scrawl on the page that passed for his name.

* * *

"Ploopy, come back to bed!"

Evergreen had a voice that jangled like a little brass windchime but in the wee hours of the morning she sounded more sandpapery squeaky. "Ploopy..." she called out again with more of a lilt, "your naughty nightingale wants you. If Ploopy knows whats good for him he'll come back to bed riiiight nooooowww."

'Ploopy' was just some witless moniker she fashioned for her beau one drunken evening when the two were out strolling the beach arcades. She recalled the dazzling aggressive lights, the buzzers and bells and whistles and gongs that emanated from the larger clamor of the boardwalk crowds and the jostling rush of the surf. He'd won a big pink stuffed koala bear for her and she walked pressed against his side with contented satisfaction.

That was six months ago.

Now 'Ploopy' stood the toothbrush upright in the tall glass and closed the medicine cabinet. He looked in the mirror, baring his teeth. On the left side of his mouth, his upper gold tooth shone like a sun. His dark Aztec eyes blazed like black pebbles in a limpid pool.

Evergreen was stretching her slender torso, its shimmering green-lavender-rose tattoo snaking from her left buttock upward across her back to her right shoulder, as he shut the bathroom light. He regarded her, standing just past the door's archway, as she reached for the remains of the blunt in the ashtray.

"Why are you up so early?" Her thumb spark-spark-sparked her lighter in a mini-firework exhibition but it wouldn't light. The half blunt was perched between her full adulterous lips.

With the plush towel still wrapped around his waist, he sat down on the edge of the bed. He raised an eyebrow.

"Give me that," he suggested. His smooth baritone lent it the air of a demand. She handed over the lighter that wouldn't catch. "Not that. The blunt." With a smart lopsided smile she coyly responded, "Come get it." He let the towel fall and his strong brown limbs moved slowly along the mattress.

When he got closer, he turned his head slightly then slowly swooped down toward her lips as if in a kiss. He had locked around the blunt. She giggled and playfully fought off his mouth with hers. Smack against each other, liplocked in a tug of war, the two bedmates struggled over the prize until their movements became more languid and graceful, the blunt was dispatched from its moorings and forgotten and the satin sheets were as the gentle lappings of cool timid waves of water against the lovers' bodies.

Forty five minutes later they had finished and she sat upright in the bed, this time with smoke comfortably unfurling from the burning tobacco leaf. She asked him again, "Why are you up so early?"

"I'm supposed to meet someone." He was completely dressed, bent over tying his shoelaces. They were handsome polished black shoes.

She said nothing.

He finished tying his shoes, stood up, straightened his tie. He picked up the thick ringed notebook. He put it, and the green pen with its indelible ink, into his jacket pocket. Then he went over to the windowsill and lifted up the small pearl handled gun. Despite its size it felt heavy in his hand. He checked its chamber. All the golden missiles were loaded awaiting their duty to fly.

He nuzzled it securely between his belted pants and his spine, just under his coat. He gave Evergreen a kiss on the cheek and walked out the door.

* * *