The Chamonix Chronicles — Episode 12

Bayless was about twenty feet away, holding the duffle in one hand and the pistol in the other. His gloves and hat had been removed, and he was smiling.

He repeated his question. “Going somewhere without me?”

Niko’s pulse was racing, but he pulled that guide mask on. He laughed and spoke in a steady voice. “No. Guide-school 101, make sure to bring the client back with you. ”

“Good advice,” Bayless scanned the camp site. “What you looking for then?”

“A bigger light. You scared me, heading off on your own. I was about to come find you. ”

Bayless nodded. “Why you breathing so hard?”

“Why do you have a gun?”

“I asked first.”

“I was worried. I’ve been rummaging around the boat for ten minutes — a missing client in the middle of the night can get your pulse up.”

“I’m fine. No need to worry anymore. ”

“Why the gun?”

“I heard some rustling. Thought it might be a bear.” Bayless stepped closer to Niko.

“Didn’t know you even brought a pistol out here. You’ll need something a little bigger than that for a bear.”

“I’m a pretty good shot.”

Niko thought back to Baptiste falling in the doorway as he continued his blind search within the boat. His eyes on Bayless and his hand reaching for anything he could use to defend himself.

“Well, no bears around here, so you can put it away.”

Bayless stepped a few feet closed to Niko and the boat. “I’ll hold onto it, just in case. Kind of spooky out here in the wild at night. Don’t you think?”

“The only spooky things things out here are the ones people bring with them.”

“There you are again with that soft-ass therapist talk.” Bayless pointed the pistol at Niko’s right arm, which was still searching the bottom of the hull for anything of use. “What you looking for?”

“The big light. This damn boat is a mess, gives me fits.”

“You have your headlamp.” Bayless was now pointing the gun at light on Niko’s forehead.

“I needed the big one to find you in the woods. Can you point that thing somewhere else?” Niko pulled his hand out of the boat.

Bayless smiled and lowered the weapon. “Sure. I guess.”

“What were you doing out there?”

Bayless stepped even closer. “I just wanted some privacy to spread the ashes.” He lifted the bag.

“Bag still seems full. ”

“I grabbed a few stones from the spot where I left him. For memories.”

“Thought you weren’t sentimental?”

“You’re wearing on my nerves with all these questions.”

Niko didn’t know what to do. He was frozen at Bayless’s nonchalance — just standing there as if he were taking the first sip of his second cocktail after a lazy day. Like he was taking a break between book chapters rather than between murders.

Stall, point at something else and wait until a solution appears.

“I guess you’ll want to fish some tomorrow then?” Niko asked.

“I came here to dump the damn ashes. Nothing else. We can head back tomorrow. ”

“Guess we should get some sleep then.”

Bayless walked over the faint embers of the fire and put the bag down. He kept the pistol in hand as he sat.

“I think I’ll say up for a while. How long to get back?”

“Day or two. ”

“Let’s get an early start so we’re back tomorrow. ”

“Sure. ” Niko walked to his tent, trying to move with the fluidity of a relaxed guide eager to catch some sleep before a big day. He zipped the door and lay, eyes open into the darkness, listening for movement. He heard none.

Niko stared at the canvas for hours, and his mind scrambled for a way out of this. He now had less than a day to figure how to avoid bringing this menace right back to all that he loved.

He thought and inhaled the mingled smell of his abused tent, a gift he had received as a boy. It was heavy and had accumulated some mold along the way, but he loved it. He had carted it around North America, pitching in marshes just feet from big salt water, next to high Alpine lakes with views of snow-capped peaks in July, in crowded campgrounds that looked like parking lots. The old, moldy, green and yellow, square was his home in a way.

People would ask when he planned on decommissioning the thing. He would just say, “we’ll retire together, and I know I have a few more decades in me. ” He owned another tent, lighter and cleaner, but it just gathered dust in his shed.

Niko lay there, knowing Bayless was sitting outside, alert with weapon in hand. Niko could think of no way to win this match. He rolled onto his side, and as his hand passed over the hole in the bottom of the tent, he smiled — just for a moment.

Years before, the tent began to leak in heavy rains, but the bottom was still water tight, so anything that came into the tent would pool up and soak anyone or anything inside. One night, during a stalled storm, in exhausted frustration, Niko sliced a gash in the bottom corner of the tent. The pooled water drained out, and he fell asleep. When he woke in the morning, mostly dry and well-rested, he thought back to camping trips with his father. The man’s overprotective insistence that nothing sharp be brought into the tent for fear of damaging the floor and allowing ground water into a comfortable sleeping arrangement.

“Care for your tent’s floor like it’s your front door,” he would say. “A Chamonix only lies where it’s dry.”

Cutting a hole in the floor of the tent violated every rule of the outdoors that he had ever learned, but sometimes the established protocol must be abandoned. Sometimes the right solution seems the most illogical.

As the eastern sky lightened, Niko realized he must do something that defied any logic or sanity that he may have. He knew the extension of his own life was simply because Bayless didn’t want to run the boat himself. His existence was as transactional and Baptiste’s demise.

Niko knew that he must make himself useful to Bayless, play along, even move him closer Ladawambuck, in order to wait for his own opportunity to strike.

Niko could see Bayless’ outline through the pale green canvas. An abstract of a man sitting on a boulder looking to where a fire had burned, a phantom who glided into the woods and had so coldly taken a life, as if it were a leaf on a path that could be brushed to the side and forgotten with the certainty and disregard of full ignorance.

Pulling the danger closer was the only way.

Niko unzipped the tent’s door, and peered out. Bayless was staring at the ground, pistol still in hand, and Niko swore the saw a faint smile on his face, the look of reserved relief.

“You want breakfast?” he asked as he climbed from the tent.

“Let’s eat on the move. I want to be back before nightfall,” Bayless lifted his eyes from the ground and looked at Niko.

“You stay up all night?”

“What does it look like?”

Niko began packing the boat slowly. Every task completed, every piece of equipment loaded into the boat, was a step closer to giving this man what he needed to kill Tracey, but it was also an opportunity for Niko, and he didn’t want to miss it.

“If you’re in such a rush, maybe you could put the gun down and help?”

Bayless leaned back and laughed. “I didn’t pay all that money to load my own boat.”

Niko shook his head. You can’t make someone put a gun down. That’s the nature of a gun.

“Suit yourself.”

“Always have.”

As Niko loaded the boat, he did his best to watch Bayless while also concealing his own shaking hands. He wasn’t sure if the shaking was a response to anger or uncertainty, and he considered for the first time in his life how closely those two were related.

Niko had spent his life going deeper and deeper into the wild, searching for adventure and challenge and even danger into the back country. It took him a long time to understand why. For most of his life he felt that he was compelled to find these untouched landscapes in order to escape the noise of society.

It now occurred to him that he was protecting those he loved from himself. He had so much noise in his mind and soul that he wanted to take it away and hide it somewhere beautiful. He wanted to return to them with a peaceful soul. He tried mountain-tops, lonely marshes, corners of remote forests, and some the most magnificent spots you can imagine, but it never worked for long. He always felt the need to go back again and drop some of his soul’s clatter along a trout stream somewhere, and he always seemed to bring some of it back with him.

And this was the worst of that — he was bringing this sociopathic assassin back this time. All because he wanted to prove to himself that the Nagadan and his past on that river had no power over him. He wanted his wounds to heal and leave no scars. As always, he had overlooked the fact that the rivers only flow one way.

His knew that his only option was to play the happy guide. To put a smile on his face, grab the oars, follow the river, point to the horizon, and wait for a solution to present itself. When that fails, that’s when the anger can take over again. A last fight to save what is important. If needed, he would wreck the boat in a bad spot and let the river swallow both of them.

I’ll end up dead here on the Nagadan, just a little later than it seemed it was supposed to have happened.

He thought of Tracey. All that he had already put her through. He wondered how long she would look for him. Would she ever stop without a body? Would she ever forgive him or understand why he had lied to her and come out here?

He pictured her hiking the woods alone, searching for him yet again, and that dropped a profound sadness into his chest.

“You gonna get this damn thing going or just stare at the horizon all day?” Bayless was standing now, eyes glaring with impatience.

Niko hurried along and when the boat was packed they pushed off. Niko looked back to the woods, and he knew Baptiste was laying unceremoniously forgotten, eyes open staring into nothingness. Niko wondered if he was destined for a similar fate.

…

Check in next week for a new episode!