“Hey, baby.” Fera was standing at the door to her bedroom, naked.
Pell liked it that the musculature of Fera’s chest hadn’t erased her womanly figure. Her breasts were real breasts, and except for that one evening on the Sammy Rosen show, Pell was the only man to see under her dress nowadays.
All of his young life, Pell had lived in Common Ground, the place for all unemployed citizens. He had learned to appreciate a good thing. He was only nineteen, permanently unemployed and without benefits except for an octangular sleep tube underground and regular rations of rice and beans.
“Take down your pants,” Fera said.
Automatically Pell took a step forward. At the same time he pulled down his pants. He leapt toward her and she held him up in her arms. Fera grinned broadly when Pell grabbed her hair to keep his balance.
She carried him from the room while her father mused.
Fera had met Pell at a Soul Shack on Middle Broadway. He was strutting around among the Backgrounder girls, acting like the cock of the walkway. She got a hot ribs and yam dinner in a plasbox and then walked up to the group of young Backgrounders. Pell was arrogant and snide, but when she asked him if he wanted to go with her he was in the car as quickly as he could move.
“You remember when we first met?” Fera asked her lover. She was on top of him, grinding her hips.
“Yeah,” he coughed.
“Did you love me for my body or my money?” Her coarse blond hair raked his eyes.
A look of confusion came over his face. For a moment it seemed as if he had found an answer, but instead he had a powerful orgasm.
“I can’t, I can’t,” he cried meaninglessly.
“Baby, do you love me?” Fera asked Pell in her dark bedroom. Through the open window the spires of upper Manhattan stretched toward the sky.
“We don’t use that word underground.”
“What do you say, then?”
“I look for you, I see you, I won’t turn away.”
“That’s a lotta words just to say the same thing.”
“It’s not the same thing. Not at all. ‘I love you,’ means, ‘I need you.’ The way I say it means that you can count on me. The way I say it is strong.”
“You turned away from your friends to come with me.”
“I never told ’em I wouldn’t.”
Fera laid her big palm on his chest.
“I wish I was like you, Pipi,” she said.
“What you mean? Here you up above, butter and cream — and I’m down below, bread and water.”
“But you know what you think.”
“Huh?”
“If I say something or ask something, you have an answer. Even if you just don’t know you sound so sure. All I know is that I love my daddy. That and boxing is all I have. Everything else is a mess. That’s why I like fighting, because I get so mad not bein’ sure, and hittin’ somebody makes me feel better. Even gettin’ hit feels good.”
“Then that’s good enough. It keeps you upover.”
“But I want more.”
“What?”
“Like you. To look and not turn away.”
4
The Konkon fight was the turning point in Fera Jones’s career. The night before was the first time Leon experienced a Pulse Reflux episode. It left him bedridden and unable to be in his daughter’s corner. She asked Pell to stand in for her father, and the diminutive Backgrounder agreed. He had been sitting ringside for over six months and had some notion of what was expected of a corner man. The only thing he didn’t know how to do was stop the bleeding in case of a cut, but Leon had been smart enough to bring in Doc Blevins, the premier cut man of boxing, as a permanent member of Ferocious Fera Jones’s corner.
Mathias Konkon was a wily boxer. He avoided the brunt of Fera’s initial onslaught. He rolled with some blows and picked others off with deflecting gloves. He had a solid chin, too, and so whenever Fera was accurate enough to land a hard punch, she was surprised with a series of left hooks and right uppercuts in answer.
Over six rounds she had lost all but one.
In between rounds Pell begged his boxer to box.
“Stick and run, Fifi,” he pleaded. “Let him come after you. Let him come after.”
“I can get him,” Fera declared. “All I need is one shot and he’ll cave in.”
Each round she went out streaming sweat and oozing confidence, but at the bell she came back another point down on the scorecards.
In the seventh Konkon let loose. It was toward the end of the round and Fera was breathing hard. She’d thrown her full artillery at the slippery Fijian. If she had connected with anything, the announcers were certain that Mathias would have wound up in the hospital. But the shorter boxer had figured out just the right crouch to avoid a haymaker. When he saw that his opponent was temporarily winded, he threw a full-fledged attack at her head.
“Jones is in trouble!” Atkinson exclaimed at ringside.
“He’d do better to attack the body,” Bonner added conservatively. “Kill the body and the head will fall.”
At that moment, Mathias connected to Fera’s jaw with a jolting right cross. Fera Jones sprawled out on her back, unconscious from every indication. But while the referee was waving the exultant Konkon back to his corner, Fera Jones opened her eyes and willed herself to her feet.
“She’s cut!” Bonner yelled. “She’s cut over her right eye!”
The blood was cascading down the right side of her face. But Fera Jones didn’t even dab at it with her glove.
The referee asked her did she want to go on.
She nodded.
He asked her another question.
She answered to his satisfaction.
He waved for the fight to continue, but the bell rang before another blow could be thrown. Doc Blevins was in the corner with his steel compressor and cotton sticks, ready for his charge. His bald head was painted black and red for the colors of Jones’s trunks. There was a bright green stripe painted across his forehead for his Irish mother.
The ring doctor stood at the side, watching the procedure closely. Pell stood over his fighter, his fists clenched as if he wanted to hit her himself.
Instead he pinched the flesh at the tip of her chin, hard. Her eyes, vacant until then, cleared.
“He’s gonna beat you, you stupid cow. He’s gonna beat you ’cause you out there fightin’ like a girl. Like a fuckin’ girl.” Every word was broadcast around the globe on VIN, Video International Network. “You’re the best fighter that ever lived and you’re throwin’ it away ’cause you don’t want to do what you’re supposed to do.”
“I can get him,” she said.
“Not if you don’t jab. He’s got you so girly out there that you forgot how to box. He’s made a fool outta you, and look at you. All blooded up and ugly. It’s over. I’m throwin’ in the towel.”
Pell reached for the towel. He picked it up.
“No, don’t,” Fera said, more like a child than a machine of destruction. “I can do it. I can do it.”
Pell paused, towel in midair there between him and his fighter. Over a hundred million people around the globe watched.
“One round, Fera. One round to prove that you can do what’s necessary.”
The bleeding had been stemmed. Certainty returned to Fera’s eyes. She nodded and fifty million women around the world felt their hearts thrum and galvanize. Groucho T, the Internet philosopher, later said, “The whole world changed between the seventh and eighth rounds.”