Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“You better believe it,” Billy “the Eclipse” Bonner, onetime UBA lightweight champion, replied. Each word seemed to roll around on a bed of marbles before leaving his mouth. “The ladies want to see blood.”

“What do you think about Fera Jones stepping into the ring against a man, Champ?”

“Well, Chet, I’m old-fashioned. I don’t like to see ladies with the gloves on. I mean, even the WUBA is too much for me to watch sometimes. But there’s no denying that women have been becoming more competitive. They hit harder and move faster every year.”

“So do you think she has a chance tonight?”

“I don’t think she’ll get hurt too bad,” Bonner replied. “Jellyroll is more of an act than he is a fighter. They set him up with opponents that have no chance against him. I mean, the crowd loves it, I do too, but Jellyroll tipped the scale at almost three-eighty at weigh-in, and he doesn’t have a knockout punch.”

“Three-eighty,” Chet agreed. “And six seven. But Fera Jones weighs an impressive two-sixty and stands six foot nine. She has the reach, age, and height advantage over Jellyroll. And she looks like she was molded from iron. I mean, just look at the muscle definition on those legs.”

“Nice legs, I’ll agree with that, Chet. But this is a brutal sport. Man is the warrior. I don’t care how much the Radical Feminist Separatist movement wants to play with genetics, a man will always come out on top in one of these wars.”

It was never proven that Fera Jones was the product of SepFem-G, an outlawed genetics program that came out of the feminist studies department at Smith College. Actually, there was evidence to the contrary. Fera lived with, and was managed and trained by, her father, Leon Jones, a onetime history professor at U. Mass. Not that there weren’t lots of questions about them.

Leon was Negro, medium brown with thick, kinky hair, generous lips, and a broad nose. Fera was a natural, if dirty, blond, with skin too dark to be Caucasian but not exactly the right coloring for Negro, either. Her mother was unknown to the public. Fera claimed that she didn’t know anything about her mother.

“Your father must have known who she was,” a woman’s magazine journalist once suggested in an interview.

“If I bring it up I can see the hurt in him,” Fera replied. It was the most she ever said about her mother publicly.

There were plenty of questions about Fera Jones. She was tall enough to play men’s basketball and strong enough to compete in a strongman contest. She’d run through the Women’s Universal Boxing Association’s list of contenders in one year — all wins by knockout. In twenty-four fights she’d gone to the second round only once. That was against Slippery WandaJoe Williams. WandaJoe managed to avoid Fera’s haymakers for the first three minutes, but ninety-one seconds into round two she caught a fist that was what Fera called her tooth decay preventative.

“If the tooth is out it can’t get decay,” she joked with Billy Bonner after the bout.

Fera was so proficient that many said she was actually a man trying to make it by pretending to be a woman. The WUBA had performed DNA tests proving Fera’s gender (also disproving the theory that she was the product of a separatist test tube). But the public was not convinced by computer graphs and petri dishes. So Fera went on the X-rated people’s access vid show Behind Sammy Rosen’s Blue Door .

Sammy’s usual guests were porn performers who had special talents and fan clubs, marital aids to hawk, or a performance schedule that needed advertising. Fera had only one thing to prove on Sammy’s show. When he tried to kiss her she pushed him to the floor and held him down with her bare foot. Then she pulled off her dress and told the vidder to get close-ups of her breasts and genitals.

“You wish I was a man,” she said into the camera. “ ’Cause if I was, somebody might have a chance to beat me.”

That one live airing moved Sammy’s show to new heights, but he never forgave Fera for his humiliation. From then on, each of his shows began with a replay of him smashing her glass image with a hammer. Of course, this only served to make her more popular.

The referee was going over the rules in the middle of the ring when a fight broke out between a man and woman on the floor of the stadium. Women poured down from their exclusive tier and security guards closed in to stop the melee.

When the ref said, “Go to your corners and come out fighting,” there were already blows being thrown and blood being spilled.

“This is exciting isn’t it, Champ?”

“I don’t know, Chet. All I can say is that I’m glad the viewers here in New York can’t see this. Even though Jellyroll is shorter, he looks much bigger than Fera.”

“I agree, Champ. She looks frightened, fragile compared to him. And you know Jellyroll says that he’s not going to go easy on her.”

The next voice heard was not one of the announcers but the gravelly deep voice of the exhibition fighter Jellyroll Gregory. “I’m gonna beat her to the floor just like she did to my friend Sammy Rosen. I’m gonna beat her down in the first round. I like to get these fights over quick, ’cause they don’t let me eat till after it’s over.”

The bell rang.

“Looks like the security forces have stopped the brawl just in time for the real fight to begin,” Chet Atkinson reported. “Fera Jones comes to the middle of the ring. Jellyroll seems cautious... No! He’s leaping right at her, both fists flailing. Fera barely avoids getting hit. She falls back. He’s jumping again! He’s run right into her. Almost four hundred pounds of man and muscle. She’s going down!”

“They’re both going down, Chet,” Bonner corrected. “The referee, Xian Luke, is calling it a fall. He’s rubbing both boxers’ gloves off on his shirt.”

“We should say that Luke is one of the best refs in the game today,” Chet said. “He asked for this job tonight because he said that he didn’t want to see anyone get hurt.”

“I don’t think he was worried about Jellyroll, Chet.”

“Me nei— Oh no! Jellyroll throws a roundhouse right that connects with Fera’s jaw. She’s falling back. She’s on the ropes. I think she might have gone all the way down if the ropes hadn’t been there to stop her. Jellyroll is on her again. He’s throwing everything he’s got. Jones is covering up.”

“Jellyroll wants to get her out of here quick. He doesn’t want to be out there carrying around three hundred and eighty pounds in the later rounds.”

“Another fight has broken out in the seats!”

“Forget that, Chet! Fera’s coming back! She’s jabbing in the center of the ring. Look at the speed of that jab! One, two.... six jabs before Jellyroll could get his defense up. His eye, yes, there’s a cut open over his left eye! Jellyroll is bleeding. Jellyroll is bleeding!”

Chet Atkinson jumped in to say, “It’s like old times. Like back when they fought bare-knuckled. They’re swinging in and out of the ring. Fera Jones is going for Jellyroll’s spare tire. We can hear the blows here at ringside. He’s trying to mount a counterattack. Fera better watch it. She’s leaving herself open swinging away like that. Oh! Jellyroll connected to her jaw again.”

“That was right on the money,” Billy Bonner cried. “Jones is backing up, but she’s not going down. Oh! He connected again. What’s holding this woman up?”

“I don’t know, Champ. But she’s not falling back on the ropes this time. Fera Jones is going to the body. These blows are vicious. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman when you get hit like that. Oh shit!” Chet Atkinson never complained about the $10,000 he was fined for cursing on a show with only a V rating. “She connected with an uppercut! Jelly-roll is lifted from the canvas! He’s down! He’s down! Jellyroll Gregory is down!”