“Nah, nobody ahead. Not yet.”
Naomi was hoping that Pryde Elka would win, soon. Hoping that the cut above D.D. Dunphy’s eye would begin bleeding again. And the ugly fight would be halted. For she did not like the feelings it was arousing in her, that were new to her, crude and barbaric and shameful.
Admit it: you want Dunphy hurt. You want Dunphy badly hurt.
Like her father the murderer: destroyed.
But at the start of the third round there came D.D. Dunphy rushing at her opponent with renewed energy, with a kind of pit bull ferocity, flatfooted but relentless, pressing blindly forward. Dunphy resembled both a stocky-bodied adolescent girl and a mature woman, so driven. Her strategy appeared to be sheer pressure: using her weight, her height, her indifference to being hit, to her advantage. Naomi had heard of “counter-punching”—she could see that Dunphy, the less skilled boxer, took a kind of energy from being hit, receiving sharp-stinging jabs to her face, that inflamed her lower face, and bloodied her nose. Each blow seemed to rejuvenate her, inspire her. Elka could punch, and Elka could connect, yet no blow of hers was strong enough to stop Dunphy’s assault; and when the bell rang to end the round, there was applause from the audience and even a cry—Dun-PHY!
How fickle they are, Naomi thought in disdain. You could not place any faith in them.
In the next round, and in the next, Dunphy continued to push Elka backward. Many jabs struck Dunphy’s reddened face, many blows struck her shoulder, her midriff, even her breasts, but Dunphy was not deterred. The effect was of a blind creature like a mollusk pressing forward, always forward. In her seat Naomi felt paralyzed. Her mouth had gone dry, she could not stop swallowing, or trying to swallow.
Each time she opened her eyes it was to see D.D. Dunphy lowering her head, coming forward, swinging. And another time, the cut above Dunphy’s eye began to bleed. Surely the fight would be stopped now? Surely—soon? But Dunphy hardly paused, peering through a mask of blood, blinking and fixing her opponent in her vision, grunting as she struck at Elka with both fists, a left, a right, a blow to the underside of Elka’s chin, unprotected for a fleet second. And Elka was staggered but held on to her opponent as a drowning person would clutch at a rescuer, gasping for breath. Until at last the bell rang again.
“Now, who is winning?”
“White girl winning.”
“White girl?”—Naomi’s voice trailed off in dismay.
The row of black boys laughed at her. Wasn’t she a white girl, herself?
Another time, it occurred to Naomi that she could leave. Very quickly, unobtrusively, get to her feet and hurry up the aisle and disappear out of the Armory, find a taxi to take her back to her hotel . . .
She would call Darren, just to hear his voice. She would laugh with Darren, reminiscing about Katechay Island. Their impossible mother! Was Ms. Matheson some relative of yours? Are you all related?
No one but Darren with whom she might laugh, laugh until she was exhausted. Both of them sobbing with laughter. Are you all related?
Fifth round, the boxers got tangled in each other’s legs. Amid a clinch Elka struck furiously at Dunphy’s lower back (was this a foul? kidney-punching?), grabbed at Dunphy’s muscled shoulders, and Dunphy wrenched herself back to get leverage to strike at Elka’s (lowered) head, and suddenly, comically—the two women had fallen to the canvas, and the crowd erupted into laughter as the annoyed referee commanded them: “On your feet. On your feet.”
Almost, Naomi thought she’d heard the referee say ladies.
On your feet ladies. Mocking, muttered.
Or—had she imagined this?
Badly she wished that Luther Dunphy’s daughter would be knocked down, humiliated—lose this terrible fight. Yet, she did not really want either of the boxers to be seriously hurt.
Especially she did not want Pryde Elka—(could that really be her name? Pryde Elka?)—to be hurt, and to lose. She had read that Elka was the divorced mother of two young children, one of whom was “severely autistic”; she was a factory worker in Electra, Illinois; she’d begun boxing intermittently at the age of seventeen and had had two title fights (which she’d lost); the previous year she’d acquired a new manager and new trainer and was embarked now upon a “comeback campaign.”
(Some online sources challenged Pryde Elka’s affiliation with the Shawnee Nation. But these were vigorously denied by Elka’s handlers.)
Information about D.D. Dunphy was sparse. You would not have known that Dunphy was the daughter of a notorious murderer executed in Ohio in 2006. Apart from her boxing record all that was claimed for “The Hammer of Jesus” was that she was active in the Zion Missionary Church in her hometown Dayton, Ohio.