Ouroboros - A Short Story

Ouroboros

By

Trapper John

“All things began in order so shall they end, so shall they begin again according to the Ordainer of Order and the mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven."

- Sir Thomas Browne, “The Garden of Cyrus”

Calvin Boudreau looked down at the snow-dusted driveway. His wife’s footprints, cookie cutter sharp, disappeared into a wet, black rectangle where her car had sheltered pavement from falling snow. An old crab apple tree arched over the parking spot. A single withered leaf twirled in an improbable frenzy at the tip of a branch, wind spun, warning of the oncoming storm. He wondered how it managed to maintain the fragile anchor line, and why it alone chose to cling so tenaciously to its mooring when all others had long since surrendered to gravity and winter and gone to ground.

The house loomed behind, empty. His daughter and son-in-law left earlier for work, his wife more recently for her weekly luncheon with friends. He looked skyward. The forecast said a weak cold front from east of the Cascades would shed four to six inches of snowfall on the Klamath Basin. He knew better, knew this storm would be different. An unexpected southerly wind shift meant the front would race up through California, sucking up moisture until it collided with the Siskiyou Mountains at the southern Oregon border. There, the clouds’ soft gray underbelly would be ripped open on craggy peaks, spilling torrents of snow into the Basin.

Boudreau was pleased. He welcomed the storm and greeted its coming with quiet joy. He turned to his pickup and flinched as poker-hot pain seared his right hip. He slid his favorite shotgun into the cab, hauled himself behind the wheel, and headed west from town toward the Cascades. The headlight beams stabbed ahead, only to be volleyed back at the truck by dancing snowflakes. The road wound up the long flank of a mountain. Plows had already been busy and gravel hurled by the truck’s deep treads clattered against the undercarriage and wheel wells.

At first, the pain had been a mere annoyance, ignored like most anything that didn’t meet with his approval. It rewarded his detachment by migrating up and down both legs, probing his lower back, searching among the thickets of axons and dendrites for a place to roost. He suspected something more sinister than aging as its progenitor, and he was right. ALS, the doctor said. Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Boudreau sat quietly, smiled at the news and said, “That’s impossible. I’ve never played professional baseball.” The doctor didn’t reply, confused by humor coming from a dead man.

Boudreau turned onto a side road and slipped into four-wheel drive. He pictured his destination as if viewed from twenty thousand feet; a vast matrix of mountain roads interlaced like knife marks on a cutting board. The road he chose crawled upward from the base of a tall butte. At seven thousand feet, it narrowed to wind along a steep cliff. Today, the storm devoured the spectacular view.

The pickup rolled to a stop. Boudreau killed the headlights and the sparkling flakes faded into gray cotton. His cigarette lighter flared in the darkened cab. Smoke trickled from his mouth and snaked out the partially cracked window into the storm. A harsh cough racked him, and his head swam at the nicotine rush. He hadn’t smoked for nearly twenty years. No matter now. He sat and listened to the soft pinging of the cooling engine.

"Phffft." Outside, the snow hissed down, singing the song of his life. A poem long dormant in memory awakened at the sound and made him smile.

winter’s storm. snowflakes
hardly give a soft, white, damn
who they fall upon.

A cold shudder folded over him and he drew his arms closer to his body. After another hit from the cigarette, he rolled the window down an inch, the better to hear and smell the storm outside.

"Phffft." Crystalline snowflake wings displaced tiny volumes of air as they sliced through the sky. Minute sounds from each flake combined to create the signature song of this storm, itself separable and distinctive from all other storms. The delicate chorale was part of the instinctual appeal of snowfall to Boudreau, and any sign of abatement left a profound sense of disappointment. “It’s letting up,” he would say. But this storm showed no signs of failing him.

His thoughts swirled and drifted to other snowfalls. He remembered being eight and curious about the forest nearby his family’s home. He asked for permission to go there with some older neighborhood boys. His father refused and warned him to stay out of the woods. “You don’t know who or what is in there. Best you stay clear.” His dark admonition was intended more to control than protect and he expected unquestioned obedience. The boy understood that he was required to experience life on his father’s terms. But the pull of the forest was visceral, and he committed his first act of defiance within two weeks of the warning.

One afternoon, the draw became too great. Alone in a light snow, he crossed the fields to the birches at the forest edge and crept into the trees. The place felt electrified, wired, he felt sure, to contain something within rather than to keep him out. The wind hissed through the branches and he felt watched as he walked. What if he fell and broke a leg? His breath came faster, but he plunged onward to a clearing. On its far side, tall hemlock and white pine took charge of the forest. The wind intensified, sighed through the dense needles. The sound scared him, but he crossed the clearing and stepped into the dark understory of swaying trees. Neighborhood rumors of a mountain lion sighting stalked through his mind. If his father learned of this sortie, it would be better to be taken by the lion. He stumbled onto a spot where back eddies of wind sculpted shelter in the snow. A few small twigs, stacked teepee style and touched off with a single match, quickly produced a snapping fire. Boudreau stood and stared into the popping embers, stoked the blaze against the chill around him. A great sense of peace settled about him, and he knew this was a holy place.

At the remembrance of fire, he shivered and thought again of his circumstances. At the diagnosis, his family rallied to him. The home of half a lifetime sold quickly. He and his wife moved in with their daughter and her husband, who had insisted persuasively. Appreciation gave way to frustration, for while their concern was genuine, he soon chafed at the encumbrances of the protective net cast about him. He struggled to maintain his independence, and daily walked the greenway that surrounded his daughter’s home. Coyotes prowled at dusk, and raccoons, grown fat and careless on cat food, roamed freely. Squirrels foraged in the oak-rich borders. They reminded Boudreau of a bevy of gray-suited accountants hunched over their ledgers, nervous at his passage lest he throw off their sums. People were friendly, especially dog owners. He had never seen such a large collection of exotic and essentially useless breeds.

He came to hate the greenway, an artifice of nature. As if nature had anything at all to do with manicured, chemically enhanced greenness and semi-wild creatures and children in plastic bicycle helmets. When wild geese shouted down at him as they crossed overhead, he felt mocked and abandoned. He missed the woods. He stopped walking, felt old, and struggled to hang on to an image of himself that melted away by the day.

He argued more with his family. They encouraged him to focus on what he could do rather than what he couldn’t. There were well-intentioned discussions over when it would be best for him to stop driving. Once, he ventured that he might like to raise a new pup, another Lab. His daughter trumped this notion immediately. “Who will clean up after it when you aren’t able,” she countered. It was, after all, her house. “I guess a fifty-six year old man can have a pup. In fact, he ought to be able to have as many as he wants,” he bristled. The argument escalated until Boudreau turned on them all. “I have become the son, and you are all my father,” he shouted.

He withdrew more and allowed his thoughts to wander in dark places. He knew that in the end, the disease would claim his lungs and diaphragm and crush him in a fog of carbon dioxide narcosis. The doctors would ensure that death was painless. He did not fear death itself; he feared dying a mute and helpless wreck of a man. More often, as he pondered all of this, his thoughts returned to his childhood holy place. And then the storm had come to beckon him, to offer once more the quiet bliss of woods and winter and snow.

But now, his teeth chattered the alarm that the cold had become dangerous. The primordial part of his brain demanded survival and filled him with the urge to run and stamp and flap his arms, to do anything to fend off the cellular crystallization that would lead to feelings of warmth, security, then the deepest of all sleeps. The keys taunted him from the steering column. He reached for them, but his hand wavered in the cold. How easy to start the engine and crawl back down the mountain to lights and warmth and a soft bed. He yanked the keys free and rammed them deep into his jacket pocket.

He shivered again. And again. Then, movement outside tugged at what was left of his attention. Beyond the faint and dwindling line of demarcation between clear glass and thick, icy slurry, at his outer ring of visibility, a coal black shape wended its way along the road. Coyote, maybe. Too small for a lion. Alert to the presence of the truck and its occupant, nose to the wind, it approached. It stopped ten feet from the truck and sat down in the snow, as if waiting for Boudreau to make the next move.

Condensation that had but seconds before been warm vapor deep within his lungs clouded the window. He cleared it with a gloved hand and at once identified his visitor. The blocky head and lopsided, tongue-lolling grin could only belong to a Lab. He opened the cab door and slid out into the knee-deep snow. He knew the dog, so he spoke to him.

“How are you, you old fool?”

“Mostly all right. Back legs pained me some for a while, but that passed.”

Boudreau flexed his back and grimaced. “Oh, I know a thing or two about pain.” He was no more surprised that the dog could speak than he was by its presence in the first place.

“Well. I can see that.” The dog cocked his head, lifted his ears, and waited patiently.

Boudreau cleared his throat. “I want to ask you something. That day… when I took you up on the hill under the old juniper and the vet came… were you pissed with me afterward?”

“Hmmm… good question. Pissed, no. Surprised, yes. I guess I sure as hell was every bit of that.”

“Did it – did we hurt you?”

“Naw, I just got all warm and drowsy. Next thing I knew, you and I were standing under the tree while the vet drove off with someone who looked just like me in the bed of his pickup.”

“Good. I mean, glad it didn’t hurt you any. They say it doesn’t, but you never know.”

“It was hardest when you left the hill. I tried to follow, but couldn’t. I waited for you all night. The next morning, you walked back up the hill and I could tell everything had changed. You were there, yet you weren’t able. To see me, I mean.”

“Felt you, though. Thought it best to just cut you loose. Hard thing for a man to do, letting go of what he’s loved.”

A snowflake balanced on the dog’s nose. He licked it away and said, “Okay, let’s cut to the chase. What are you doing up here, anyway?”

Boudreau was surprised. “Pretty blunt talk for a dog, don’t you think?”

“Who says I’m a dog?”

“Well, for now, I do. I knew you as a dog – a damn fine one, if I may say – so if it meets with your approval, you’ll be a dog for a while more.”

“Works for me. But let me try again. I know why you are here. The question is, do you?”

“Because I’m still trying to figure out if the damn glass is half-empty or half-full, which seems a particularly useless debate if the goddamned glass is broken anyway. I can’t tell if how you live defines who you are, or if who you are defines how and why you live, and if being a man depends on whether you choose one over the other. It all comes down to how you see things, and there’s the half-empty, half –full thing again, like a snake eating its own tail.”

The dog did not reply, but rose, stretched, and walked to the right front tire. He lifted his leg. “Aaaah, that feels good.”

The man laughed at the dog’s insolence. “You always had to mark every damn tree and shrub in your path.”

“As I recall, you left a pretty mean scent trail yourself, what with all your farting and scratching. So, do you still hunt, or just sit around and talk about it?”

“Seems I lost interest and gave it up.”

“Probably just as well. You were a terrible shot, anyway.” The dog grinned at him, waiting for a reaction.

“Here, now! I think I put plenty of feathers in your mouth in our day.”

“Didn’t say I wasn’t busy. Just took you lots of shots, is all.”

“Well, I guess I’ll not be arguing with an old fool of a dog in this weather.”

“Good point. Say, do you still have that old shotgun?”

“Sure. Right here in the truck.”

“There’s a beaver pond about a mile from here. A flock of honkers set down on it as the storm came up. Want to go bag a couple?”

“Wouldn’t mind that at all.” Boudreau opened the cab door and lifted the shotgun from the seat. He turned to the dog. “You ready?”

The dog answered as he had many years ago, bounding high. “Four off the floor,” dog men called it, the ultimate expression of canine joy. Another eager leap, and the dog turned and plunged headlong into the snow. Together, as before, they started down the trail. The dog pressed against Boudreau’s side, nipping mischievously at his gloved hands, urging him on until the truck, now a white lump on the forest floor, faded into the driving snow behind them.

***