Chapter One
Downbar through the sawdust, back here in the backmostbackroom, four men—three of them carp-eyed, shaggy and increasinglydeep in their drams—are draped over armless chairs,armless, wingbacked, split-bottomed chairs irregularly intervaledaround an octagonal table inlaid with baize, derrydown green.
The back of the fourth, as stems from his wont, is squared tothe wall half hunched to the table, right shoulder hefted, high-cocked.A plait of polycolored rawhide spills insouciantly fromthe back of his hat brim tigertailing the nape of a neck white andsleek as a swan's. (The rest of him too; thin as a whim, no morethan a slat of beached driftwood inside a hollow gray suit.) Hewears the hat, an immaculate black, on a raffish cant slung so lowto the brow that while one can discern beneath the cave of itsawning both the manicured batwing of a silver-blond moustacheand the chevron of a recently raised imperial, the eyes remainlargely a rumor. His pallor is the color of caulk.
Outside the rain's bent ragged, slanting down in scars. Mileoff, less maybe, lightning trims the bark off a tree. Thunder jawssome, shirrs. Wind sharks. It's one of those nights again, eighththis week (seems like)—boding, broody, black as hornblende, likethe sky clewed up all the good light, each lick, then lit out with ithellbent for home.
Smoke yeasts nicotine yellow, scrums sallow above the headsof the four players, patches there, sags some, then rankles up inquills through saloon saffron lamplight inside Nuttall & Mann'sNo. 10, Deadwood, Dakota Territory, another jungled, jagged,endless 4 a.m. The smoke lends a measure of grain to the light;the light is possessed of some burl. This Hour, as the professionalscall it, of the Meridian.
Wild Bill cashed it in around here someplace, rumor has it,while back, August last; old news, though they've yet to bestirthemselves to tack up the plaque in tribute—to his memory, or thebrass of its myth.
Room's a humidor, close as a hairshirt, sodden with stench:spittoon, cuspidor and gaboon, long-staled cigar, spilt beer,sloshed whiskey, skittish men's sweat; keg pickle, Scotch egg,Limburger cheese; cowhide and soaped leather, buckskin andbrine, fester, funk, fresh blood and kerosene. And fear. Rank, rancidairlessness of it. That clabbered mortality.
His face sweats down his shirtfront, soaks its pastel, blue-through.(His weskit, a cinch-waist, fleur-de-lis, silver-and-blackbrocade, is flocked with hawks-aloft, turquoise-and-teal, raisedvelvet weltings, the gold stickpin in his left lapel inset with a diamondthe size of a drupe.) Atop the table upon which the cardslie before him one down and four up, an uncorked, near-emptybottle of Gideon's Brown buffers a shotglass two fingers full. Withhis left hand, a hand kid-gloved so tight-to it appears painted onflesh, he slips a splint of long-nine black cheroot from the clenchof his teeth; with his right, hooks the shotglass, raising it to hislips, then glutches back its contents before sliding it drained,croupier-like back to its place beside the bottle. Crisp as a salute.He feels the familiar scald of its descent in advance of the searingsuffusion; fume surf.
This, he thinks, this right here and right now, this alone matters.The rest—once upon a time? happily ever after?—all that'sso much stemyanking.
He stacks his chips in impeccable chimneys, seldom worryingthem the way his opponents intermittently do, drumming theones on top against those below or letting them draggle absentlythrough the channels of his fingers: whites, blues, reds, yellows;25 cents, $1, $10, $50. At the moment he is down some, suckingwind and running light, light enough to be flirting with bust. Indeedhe is but a single misstep from being cleaned out to thequick by his foes—Bill Massie, Cad Mann and Charley Rich, thelatter most flush by far. It's reckon a way to jigsaw this hand, now,or duck shit-out-of-luck for the door.
When he coughs, ructioned and roughshod, as at protractedlength, it is deep, wet, pleural and bronking, a braying from thebelly of both lungs—rake across washboard, gravel out a grate,barbed wire drug through a pipe. The others, those seated at thetable as likewise the mopes, gawks and railbirds slouched alongthe walls, visibly wince, flinch and shrink back as if in expectationof his bones bolting as free of their sockets as loose change spilledfrom a pocket.
Hackling something more lotion than not—membrane,morsel, red thread of thorax—into the flag of silk that he fishesunfurled from his breast pocket, after a moment's scrutiny hefolds it back on itself before rearranging the geometry of its cornersand returning it fluffed like a flower, boutonniered in place.His moustache is glistered, a smutch of cerise, and it is only withthe utmost effort that he ignores the impulse to harrow his handthrough the broken bread of his body as a raft one might wrestover reef. His lungs feel as if they are being flensed, or their tickingfiled at with fleam teeth; he is coughing himself fraught tofractions—curd, clot, each necrotic clod through the cud—a decimalat a time.
Recovering just enough of himself—the sight of his ownblood, the rouge of its livery, while one with which he is intimatelyacquainted, never fails to appall him—the words tilt out from beneaththe hat, spindrift and spume: You need pardon me, boys,but I fear you find me mired in a slump and upon the steep decline,the old élan gone forfeit, its vital but fuel to the Void. Thething about dying is, after a while it drains all the sand from aman. Hourglass empties, if you catch my meaning. Might I suggest,I have seen much my better days.
The rain is a prod at the window; when it beckons him on hepushes away from the table, lags over and, a sidelong eye stillfixed on the competition, leans his forehead flat to the smoothcool of its pane. Trying the sash he discovers it will not budge.The rain is a taunt. He requires the grim monotony of its air,longs to cleanse the rhythm of his breathing in the solvent of itsclarity, to take the storm inside his head, but when he pounds hisfist against the glass, it will neither star nor shatter.
An inch or two shy of six feet, no more than 130 pounds, heappears a man at low wick, as one possessed of having nothingworth losing to lose. Something about his life, and then again hishaving to live it, to keep breathing, the way the two seem hourly tocleave closer and closer apart; he cannot help thinking that somethinginevitably must happen to distract him, to oblige him tocease paying heed, forget himself, glance aft, lose track of the tideof his lungs, if only for an instant, and by the time he slews roundagain—pfffft!—he will have disappeared. He knows that impunityis a lie, perhaps the greatest lie of all, knows that no one walksaway from it without having been punished for the privilege, thatno one escapes unthrashed or unthwarted, he knows that none ofus, not a one of us, thrives.
You in, Holliday, or you got it in mind to stare out that window'til you catch sight of Wild Bill's ghost?
Guffaws all around.
Only at some length does he lift his forehead from the glass.His brow is naturally waffled and it bequeaths its imprint, sheetmusic to the pane. Delaying his resumption at the table until it'sbecome a positive dodge, he waits to reclaim his seat before easingthe remark from its scabbard: Gents, a thought. You can tell alot about a man from the way he goes about killing himself, wouldyou not agree?
His eyes roundelay the table, snake eyes laughing, but no onesees it, how they're being made sport of and boshed, how they'rebeing guyed. They just shift vaguely, one by one, null-eyed intheir chairs.
So doubles back, tries again: Care to know why I loathe it so,this life? Yes? No? Fine then—it's because it's a killer, that's why.Nought but a motherless tyrant. The hateful part about living is, itinsists that each day you wake up ... you're alive.
Which at least, at last, stirs a response. Viz: Come on, Doc,you scarecrowed, morbid sumbitch, knock it off. Give the macabreshit a rest for once. Christ on the fucking cross, there's got tobe ten thousand dollars potted there. Goddamn ghoul, play thehand, Doc, or pay the devil his due.
The remark, recited by the three, as it seems to him, in perfectunison, bites through a round of briary looks bunching hardupon the boil.
What was it? he thinks. A year ago? Less? Right here someplace.This very table, could have been, this very chair. Aces andeights. Caught him holding, aces and eights. Deadman's hand.Deadman's hand dead in its deathclutch. Back of his head blownclean out its fore. Skullchip, brain, grume-spattered floor. Whatwas it Ben Thompson had once told him? Every time a man sitsdown to a card game to gamble he takes his life in his hands andlays it between himself and his adversary. Well, Bill knew that betterthan most, Wild Bill did, and all it got him—however pickledat the time on pink gin—was bushwhacked.
But tonight? Tonight it's all the unkindness of the cards. Discard,deadwood, rubbish, refuse, trash not fit for a scow. Famineand drought, loss after loss, hand after hand, not a break tobe bought. Cold and colder still, cold as a corpse content in itscrypt.
Until ... now. This hands-down winner. Cinch hand. Nuthand. Monster hand. Full house, jack high in the hole, jacks andsevens showing, and the pot the splashiest one of the evening,richest one all week, a corker he's bet up after his rule, "alwayswager a winning hand to the hilt for not a thin dime less than it'sworth." And just the single hand to beat, Massie and Mann sincehaving folded, the one to his immediate left, the queens, CharleyRich's. Those three cunts showing.
Peels off his gloves, slowly, de-li-ber-ate-ly, m-e-t-h-o-d-i-c-a-l-l-y,left first, then right, laying them out, smoothing them down,ironing them flat across the table, buying time. All the time in theworld. A bluff, but why not? Savoring it.
Then flexes his fingers, bloodless as icicles; they snick likeaged kindling. (Years hence the Aspen Daily Times will write:"They are such—clipped, filed, shaped, buffed, and apparentlylustrously lacquered—as one seldom encounters save upon themost dextrous [sic] of surgeons. Long, lithe, supple as harp-strings,expressive as swan's wings, his fingers are decidedly thoseof a concert pianist's. Or professional pistoleer's.")
He has been having this nightmare lately. Three, sometimesfour times a week. His fingers are made of wire. Telegraph wire.There is no feeling in them, no sensation, no song, nothingbut the numbness of copper and copperjacketing, and no matterhow much he has at them with the sandpaper, nothing. And thensomeone—just whom he could not say; he has yet to delineatea face—steals into his room while he is sleeping and snips themoff at the bottom knuckle with a shears, clean as scalpel. In themorning he awakens to his fingers strewn across the floor likecuticle.
Inside its bone pouch his brain is maniac.
And then ...
It happened so quickly, extraordinarily quickly, quick as miracle,that's the one thing everyone would agree upon later. Truestory, and you were there.
(There are times when the mind is so perfectly aligned to theuncoiling of the moment, the moment of thought so immaculate,taut and unleavened, so clean with acuity, that only the poise ofphysical madness remains.)
The call is made, he is called, and as he thumbs over his holecard—the jack of hearts—with his right hand, he abruptly spins inhis chair, the sheer swiftness of this unprovoked gesture, its suddenness,blank surprise, butt swiveling torquing towards Richsmooth as churned butter, pivot of pirouette, at the same timesame motion the same hand flowing inside the flap of his coatjerking the knife from his armpit glancing 7-inch veer of steel onesecond inside then outside the frock, hare jacked from a hat, hisleft hand meanwhile having tackled Rich's left wrist locking it upshackling it down staking it flat upon the table where ... pitch ofpoured metal stab, bladestrike to plungepoint, no spray outsplayno bump of blood but dull stun of wood stemming clean throughcorsage.
Through butterfly, pinned palm down to tabletop. Trumped.
Nor a sound save the wind and the rain, their strafe throughhis drawl: My dear Sir, if the queen of hearts, as you but a momentago thought to fob it sight unseen from your vest, is not justthere impaled beneath your hand, as I know it upon the memoryof my sainted mother to be, I fear I do owe you an apology.
* * *
Sun's up hard. Outspread and splashy. Dayfall strewn likescree. Against its orange chafe, through the lungburn, hefts Kateoff her feet, hoisting her into the sling of his arms as he punts thehotel room door open with a bootpoint; crosses its threshold likea groom.
Where for the next two hours, engulfed, the love of your life,this woman—the having come home to the hasp of her. The highhinge of her hips your horizon.
Strange ...
How, however briefly, bedraggled
history
focuses
—MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Yet does it all come miraculously to life?
Or is it the solitary crank who's right,
The unofficial historian?
—JOHN ASHBERY
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bucking the Tiger by BRUCE OLDS. Copyright © 2001 by Bruce Olds. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2001 by Bruce Olds. All rights reserved.
