Bucking the Tiger: A Novel

by Bruce Olds

Overview

An American Library Association Notable Book

John Henry Holliday was an Ivy League-educated dentist from a genteel Georgia family when at the age of twenty-one he was diagnosed with consumption and given six months to live. Instead, over the next fifteen years, he composed of his sojourn on America's western frontier a paean to the ways in which a man might bluff death—and attain a measure of immortality.

In Bucking the Tiger, Bruce Olds uses a pan-dimensional, genre-blurring collage of original poems, reconstituted news accounts, adulterated epigraphs, song lyrics and photographs, simulated eyewitness testimony, fictionalized memoir, invented correspondence, re-imagined folk history—less to restore the past of a figure who in his lifetime was more thoroughly mythologized than Jesse James or Billy the Kid, than to re-story it entirely.

Evoking Doc Holliday's checkered careers as a frontier dentist, itinerant saloon gambler, professional faro dealer, and occasional shootist (including his involvement in the fabled gunfight at the OK Corral), Bucking the Tiger displaces the popular image of the Latin-spouting serial killer with the reality of a human being who, exiled to an emotional and physical landscape to which he was singularly unsuited, strove to make of his self-affliction an expression of sustained, if often violent, art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312420246
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/03/2002
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Bruce Olds is the author of Raising Holy Hell which was named Novel of the Year by the Notable Books Council of the American Library Association. He lives in New Jersey.

Read an Excerpt

Downbar through the sawdust, back here in the backmost backroom, four men — three of them carp-eyed, shaggy and increasingly deep in their drams — are draped over armless chairs, armless, wingbacked, split-bottomed chairs irregularly intervaled around an octagonal table inlaid with baize, derrydown green.

The back of the fourth, as stems from his wont, is squared to the wall half hunched to the table, right shoulder hefted, high-cocked. A plait of polycolored rawhide spills insouciantly from the back of his hat brim tigertailing the nape of a neck white and sleek as a swan's. (The rest of him too; thin as a whim, no more than a slat of beached driftwood inside a hollow gray suit.) He wears the hat, an immaculate black, on a raffish cant slung so low to the brow that while one can discern beneath the eave of its awning both the manicured batwing of a silver-blond moustache and the chevron of a recently raised imperial, the eyes remain largely a rumor. His pallor is the color of caulk.

Outside the rain's bent ragged, slanting down in scars. Mile off, less maybe, lightning trims the bark off a tree. Thunder jaws some, shirrs. Wind sharks. It's one of those nights again, eighth this week (seems like) — boding, broody, black as hornblende, like the sky clewed up all the good light, each lick, then lit out with it hellbent for home.

Smoke yeasts nicotine yellow, scrums sallow above the heads of the four players, patches there, sags some, then rankles up in quills through saloon saffron lamplight inside Nuttall & Mann's No. 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 professionals call 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 bestir themselves to tack up the plaque in tribute — to his memory, or the brass 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 and brine, fester, funk, fresh blood and kerosene. And fear. Rank, rancid aimlessness of it. That clobbered mortality.

His face sweats down his shirtfront, soaks its pastel, blue-through. (His weskit, a cinch-waist, fleur-de-lis, silver-and-black brocade, is flocked with hawks-aloft, turquoise-and-teal, raised velvet weltings, the gold stickpin in his left lapel inset with a diamond the size of a drupe.) Atop the table upon which the cards lie before him one down and four up, an uncorked, near-empty bottle of Gideon's Brown buders a shotglass two fingers full. With his left hand, a hand kid-gloved so tight-to it appears painted on flesh, he slips a splint of long-nine black cheroot from the clench of his teeth; with his right, hooks the shotglass, raising it to his lips, 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 searing suffusion; 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's so much stemyanking.

He stacks his chips in impeccable chimneys, seldom worrying them the way his opponents intermittently do, drumming the ones on top against those below or letting them draggle absently through the channels of his fingers: whites, blues, reds, yellows; 25 cents, $1, $10, $50. At the moment he is down some, sucking wind and running light, light enough to be flirting with bust. Indeed he is but a single misstep from being cleaned out to the quick by his foes — Bill Massie, Carl Mann and Charley Rich, the latter 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 protracted length, it is deep, wet, pleural and bronking, a braying from the belly of both lungs — rake across washboard, gravel out a grate, barbed wire drug through a pipe. The others, those seated at the table as likewise the mopes, gawks and railbirds slouched along the walls, visibly wince, flinch and shrink back as if in expectation of his bones bolting as free of their sockets as loose change spilled from a pocket.

Hackling something more lotion than not — membrane, morsel, red thread of thorax — into the flag of silk that he fishes unfurled from his breast pocket, after a moment's scrutiny he folds it back on itself before rearranging the geometry of its corners and returning it fluffled like a flower, boutonniered in place. His moustache is glistered, a smutch of cerise, and it is only with the utmost effort that he ignores the impulse to harrow his hand through the broken bread of his body as a raft one might wrest over reef. His lungs feel as if they are being flensed, or their ticking filed at with fleam teeth; he is coughing himself fraught to fractions — curd, clot, each necrotic clod through the cud — a decimal at a time.

Recovering just enough of himself — the sight of his own blood, the rouge of its livery, while one with which he is intimately acquainted, never fails to appall him — the words tilt out from beneath the 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. The thing about dying is, after a while it drains all the sand from a man. 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 he pushes away from the table, lags over and, a sidelong eye still fixed on the competition, leans his forehead flat to the smooth cool 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 its clarity, to take the storm inside his head, but when he pounds his fist against the glass, it will neither star nor shatter.

An inch or two shy of six feet, no more than 130 pounds, he appears a man at low wick, as one possessed of having nothing worth losing to lose. Something about his life, and then again his having to live it, to keep breathing, the way the two seem hourly to cleave closer and closer apart; he cannot help thinking that something inevitably must happen to distract him, to oblige him to cease paying heed, forget himself, glance aft, lose track of the tide of his lungs, if only for an instant, and by the time he slews round again — pfffft! — he will have disappeared. He knows that impunity is a lie, perhaps the greatest lie of all, knows that no one walks away from it without having been punished for the privilege, that no one escapes unthrashed or unthwarted, he knows that none of us, 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, sheet music to the pane. Delaying his resumption at the table until it's become a positive dodge, he waits to reclaim his seat before easing the remark from its scabbard: Gents, a thought. You can tell a lot about a man from the way he goes about killing himself, would you not agree?

His eyes roundelay the table, snake eyes laughing, but no one sees it, how they're being made sport of and boshed, how they're being guyed. They just shift vaguely, one by one, null-eyed in their 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, it insists 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 macabre shit a rest for once. Christ on the fucking cross, there's got to be ten thousand dollars potted there. Goddamn ghoul, play the hand, Doc, or pay the devil his due.

The remark, recited by the three, as it seems to him, in perfect unison, bites through a round of briary looks bunching hard upon the boil.

What was it? he thinks. A year ago? Less? Right here someplace. This very table, could have been, this very chair. Aces and eights. Caught him holding, aces and eights. Deadman's hand. Deadman's hand dead in its deathclutch. Back of his head blown clean out its fore. Skullchip, brain, grume-spattered floor. What was it Ben Thompson had once told him? Every time a man sits down to a card game to gamble he takes his life in his hands and lays it between himself and his adversary. Well, Bill knew that better than most, Wild Bill did, and all it got him — however pickled at the time on pink gin — was bushwhacked.

Copyright © 2001 Bruce Olds

Editorial Reviews

Always dazzling . . . Olds blasts his stylish prose on the page with the force and spread of a sawed-off shotgun. Imagine a younger Milan Kundera saddling his horse of philosophical underpinnings and galloping through the Wild West with several bottles of John Barth's Linguistic Glee Tonic stashed in his saddlebags. It makes for a bucking pastiche of a ride.” —Chicago Tribune

“Olds writes like a turned-on angel. He dazzles us with word wizardry as survey as Doc Holliday dazzled the Wild West with a deck of cards and a six-gun.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A strikingly written, often insightful re-creation of the amusing, deadly, fatalistic Holliday.” —Dallas Morning Star

“Dazzling and exhilarating playful and witty . . . Bucking the Tiger [is] a novel which lights a torch for American historical fiction.” —Los Angeles Times

“Remarkable . . . full of explosive pyrotechnic wordplay and ideas, wherein one knows oneself to be in the presence of true brilliance . . . an amazing book by a writer of both stylistic dazzle and intellectual substance.” —The New York Times

“A work of artistic brio . . . incontrovertibly brilliant . . . To read [it] is to partake of that rare pleasure of inhabiting a writer's mind on fire.” —The Miami Herald

“Epic poetry disguised as a fearlessly inventive novel . . . a leap of genius into quantum linguistics. Olds goes forth in paragraphs spitting sparks and fireflies, to whisper up a beguiling new sound from the moldy rag and bone shop of America.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Kaleidoscopic . . . The rich prose rewards. Working territory already mined by a thousand old westerns, Olds finds startlingly fresh images.” —The New Times Book Review

“A complex, exhaustive portrait of Holliday . . . erudite and ambitious. The innovative elements that separate Bucking the Tiger from its predecessors make for impressive pyrotechnics. Touching, funny, and original. Old's writing crackles.” —The Star Ledger (Newark)

“Holliday's revealed, layer by layer . . . humanizing [a] notorious outlaw. Each moment . . . of Doc Holliday's life is mediated and aestheticized. The result is less a deconstruction of Holliday's romantic legend than a re-inscription of it. Olds drops all restraint, packing his book with images and metaphors . . . By sheer bravura, Olds is trying to write himself into an epiphany.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Profound, poetic, disturbing, exhilarating, demanding, and rewarding, this is 'Literature' on a high celestial level . . . A shimmering web of perfect words, caressing, exploring, and defining Holliday's life as an affirmative history of decay . . . A must read for anyone who will ever die.” —True West magazine

“A tale unlike any other . . . Beautifully . . . spun of laughter, love, hatred, melancholy, murder, and lust. Tiger is a poetic dance.” —Old West Chronicle

“With this stunning incantation on the life of Doc Holliday, Olds solidifies the reputation he established with his debut about John Brown . . . By nature a poet with an extraordinary sensitivity to the sounds of words . . . Olds carries the motifs of life and fate, gambling and luck straight to the center of the American fascination with fortune and individual enterprise . . . unprecedented in its acuity and grace . . . He wields the most lyrically lucid prose and poetically charged sensibility this country's literature has known in a very long while. Startling, vivid, unforgettable: a novel that compels the reading imagination.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Startling new . . . A combined western, biography, and loose anthology of meditations on death . . . As he did with John Brown . . . Olds manages to pluck a real man out of the distortions of time and Hollywood myth.” —Booklist

“Doc Holliday . . . may have at last found his poet. A compelling literary jumble of earthy monologue and ethereal narrative . . . ambitious and rewarding.” —Library Journal (starred)

“An iconoclastic fictional account that will . . . move readers to a closer understanding of one of the West's most sensational figures.” —Publishers Weekly

“Blends legend and truth into an outstanding portrait of Holliday.” —New York Daily News

“An Olds novel not only reproduces a moment in history: It re-creates the process by which that moment became history. The result is a revaluation of the code of sanctified violence that is at the heart of the Western, and of American myth. By making the defense of his human dignity the core of Doc's seemingly perverse psychology, Olds transforms a historical footnote and movie hero's sidekick into a figure of tragic and mythic import. Bucking the Tiger is . . . a fascinating exploration of the psychology and patterns of belief behind a particular kind of American mythic hero. It is also moving, funny, and smart.” —Raleigh News & Observer

From the Publisher

Although offered as a novel, this randomly organized fictional biography of John Henry "Doc" Holliday more closely resembles the cacophonous result of a three-way collision among a thesaurus, a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and a well-researched history of the American frontier. The story is derivative if not imitative of other postmodern fictional efforts in the same vein, most notably Joseph Heller's God Knows and James Carlos Blake's The Pistoleer. Literary pretensions pockmark the narrative like bullet holes in an old barn's side, and consistency, clarity and narrative flow are discarded in the name of self-conscious styling and authorial wordsmithing. Olds (Raising Holy Hell) traces the life of one of the West's most notorious characters gambler, gunman, consumptive companion to the notorious and noteworthy through a variety of literary devices including mock testimonials, newspaper reports, essayistic commentary, stultifying poetry and personal narrative spoken by Holliday himself. Bits of movie dialogue, song lyrics, references to television programs and other deliberate anachronisms litter the text and distract the reader almost as much as encyclopedic listings of everything from patent medicines to card games to euphemisms for prostitution. Unconventional grammar sometimes apparently deliberate, sometimes not also undermines Olds's attempt to provide an iconoclastic fictional account that will reveal his subject and at the same time move readers to a closer understanding of one of the West's most sensational figures: the results are more tedious than triumphant. (Aug.) Forecast: Those who enjoyed 1995's Raising Holy Hell, a critically lauded account of the life of John Brown,will probably be receptive to this title. But traditional western fans will not be amused, and the subject matter makes it a hard sell for readers in the mood for postmodern pyrotechnics. A more engaging and better-written portrait of Holliday can be found in Robert B. Parker's Gunman's Rhapsody (Forecasts, May 14.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

The subject of scores of books and movies for his hand in the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral, Doc Hollidaythe consumptive dentist turned cardsharp and gunfightermay have at last found his poet in Bruce Olds, whose 336-page cubist novel circles and approaches Doc from every conceivable angle: from the inside, through his lover Kate's eyes or those of acquaintances like Billy the Kid; through poetry and resonant lists of Doc's slang, manners, symptoms, sexual habits, or belongings (from ivory-handled Colts to his edition of Poe). Like Olds's collage-style novel about the apocalyptic Abolitionist John Brown, Raising Holy Hell, his portrait of Holliday is a compelling literary jumble of earthy monolog and ethereal narrative, with stray bits of research left lying about for atmosphere. (It's a Western novel that quotes Beckett.) Olds's Doc is more convincing than the uncharismatic, phlegm-hacking character of Paul West's novel OK (LJ 4/15/00). Those waiting for the Earp-Holliday gun team to take the field will have to wait several hundred word-rich, experimental pages, however, since language is as much the star here as the deadly exchange in Tombstone. But the story does slowly tilt toward the OK showdown, The way every Odyssey drifts west/ inchmeal/ towards its Iliad. An ambitious and rewarding work for all fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/01.] Nathan Ward, Library Journal Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

With this stunning incantation on the life of Doc Holliday, Olds solidifies the reputation he established with his debut about John Brown (Raising Holy Hell, 1995) as the Dark American Soothsayer. By nature a poet with an extraordinary sensitivity to the sounds of words, Olds here sets out a biography of sorts: a character-chant that, like his first novel, makes use of contemporary news accounts, interviews both real and invented, fragments of poetry, excerpts from textbooks, and photographs that flavor the original writing as it deals out the tale of Doc Holliday's life. "In the end, the object is always the same-to reconnoiter the poetry that lies at the heart of any history, to make the marrow sing," he writes in an afterword. Olds approaches his subject first through themes, providing both a clinical and a personal account of the consumption diagnosed at 21 that finally killed Holliday at 36, then nicely dovetailing this material into a treatment of Doc's penchant for gambling. Olds carries the motifs of life and fate, gambling and luck straight to the center of the American fascination with fortune and individual enterprise, composing a critique unprecedented in its acuity and grace. He next presents Doc's life among friends, drawing portraits of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Bat Masterson that leave the weathered chaps, ten-gallon hats, and quick-draw machismo far behind. After rendering the mythical confrontation at the OK Corral in gorgeous, operatically controlled prose, Olds concludes with Doc's dreamy, craven, painful death in a bed bloodied by his coughing. Characteristically, the author heads for the fringes of American culture yet declines to write in a style thatsimply mirrors his subject, instead seeding the tale with his own style of ravishment. He wields the most lyrically lucid prose and poetically charged sensibility this country's literature has known in a very long while. Startling, vivid, unforgettable: a novel that compels the reading imagination.

Kirkus Reviews