A Book of American Martyrs(174)
Cassidy addressed her in a drawling voice that seemed too expansive for Ernie Beecher’s small office. He told her he’d been hearing “damn good things” about her from Ernie Beecher and all that he’d seen with his own eyes had confirmed this.
D.D. wasn’t sure if she was meant to reply to this. She was finding it hard to smile but she managed to say—“Thank you.”
The man was eyeing her with a look of wary good cheer. His face was a youngish-old face of creases and dents and yet on his upper lip was a mustache of the bright hue of fox fur. He was not a tall man though he wore tooled-leather cowboy boots with a heel, a shirt of some shiny material, deep purple. His hair, a duller hue than his mustache, was slicked back thinly from his forehead. His eyes were bemused, somewhat cold. Cold dead eyes like a reptile. D.D. swallowed hard, and forced herself to smile, for Ernie was watching, and Ernie wished this. Her trainer was looking at her with that particular crease between his eyes she saw in his face sometimes when she was working out. There came Edna Mae’s hissing voice in her ear—He is Satan. They are all Satan. You are surrounded by Satan.
Some decision had been made in the trainer’s office. D.D. smiled for she did not want to appear ignorant. She understood that the men had been discussing her before she’d entered the office and she felt a small thrill of pride, that two men, two adults, should confer about her.
She thought that her father might be proud of her, if he knew. Luke would be jealous but proud, too.
The decision seemed to be, D.D. would go on half-time at Target. A schedule had been worked out leading to the fight which was February 11, 2009, in the Cleveland Armory. Cassidy—“Cass”—would provide money for D.D. as needed. A kind of allowance.
“Did you ever have an allowance, D.D.? When you were a kid?”
D.D. was overwhelmed by this news. She did not know how to reply. She did not even comprehend the question.
“Yah. I guess so.”
“Well, this will be a lot more. I guarantee.”
There was a sheet of stiff white paper—a “contract”—for her to sign. In a haze of excitement, gratitude, wonderment she signed it—Dawn D. Dunphy. Her schoolgirl signature beside a large slanted scrawl she could not decipher but had to suppose that it was Mr. Cassidy’s signature above the words which were new to her—Dayton Fights, Inc.
To her astonishment she was given eight crisp new-smelling one-hundred-dollar bills. These were counted out in her hand by Cass Cassidy—“Vy-la, D.D.!—as they say in France. The rest is boxing history.”
Clumsily then, with no warning, Cass Cassidy brought his hand down on D.D.’s head, rubbing her damp hair, in a gesture of rough affection, as one might pat the head of a favored dog. He then dared to hug her, not hard, but in the way some of the Dunphy women would hug Dawn, loose-armed, somewhat wary of the stocky girl’s stiff spine and uplifted elbows, no sooner embracing her than releasing her.
So startled by this sudden gesture from a man she feared, as by the contract and the money, the wonderful-smelling crisp new bills, Dawn Dunphy stood staring, flat-footed and speechless, arms at her sides and her hands feeling bare, without gloves.
IN AN ENVELOPE carefully printed EDNA MAE DUNPHY c/o MARY KAY MACK on Depot Street, Mad River Junction, she mailed five of these crisp new-smelling one-hundred-dollar bills to her mother whose work (as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home) paid her something like seven dollars an hour.
Dear Momma, this is for you. Sorry I am out of touch for a wile. Hope you & Anita & Noah are doing OK.
I am doing well. I am in Dayton now.
Look for me on TV in February 2009!
Love
Your Daughter Dawn
“D.D. Dunphy”—“Hammer of Jesus”
“JESUS IS LORD”
The first fight would pass in a blur.
Abruptly terminated at two minutes forty-two seconds of the first round.
There was but a small crowd scattered through the Cleveland Armory. Of five hundred seats in the shabby old arena less than one hundred were occupied. Lorina “The Cougar” Starr vs. D.D. Dunphy—“The Hammer of Jesus.”
The match between two (unranked) female welterweights scheduled for five rounds was number four on the undercard, and was scheduled to begin early—7:00 P.M. The main bout of the evening was a twelve-round match between heavyweight contenders (Deontay Wilder, Tony Thompson) ranked by the World Boxing Association at numbers four and six respectively, and would begin at approximately 9:00 P.M.
The undercard consisted of matches of ascending interest. Only the last two matches were to be televised on a cable channel.
“Lorina Starr”—(D.D. would never forget this name)—was the opponent they’d found for her, for the first fight. A woman of some age beyond thirty who lived and trained in Gary, Indiana. Lorina Starr had once been ranked at number seven (WBA women’s welterweight) but after several losses had dropped off the charts. She was said to be of Chickasaw Indian extraction.
(D.D. had learned: there were no Indian reservations in either Ohio or Illinois only just the scattered descendants of the original Indians who’d been removed to a desolate area of Oklahoma by the Indian Removal Act of the U.S. government in some long-ago time. Lorina Starr was one of these—the descendant of Chickasaws who’d managed to escape the mass evacuation to Oklahoma.)