“Charlie Chamonix, get your ass out here,” Tracey yelled, her arms coated in blood. “There is some jerk sleeping in the parking lot.”
Niko poked his head out of the screen door on the porch of the house, “No one calls me that anymore.” The door closed with Niko still inside.
Niko’s given name was Charles Nicholas Chamonix and he went by Charlie Chamonix until he was eleven years old. Then one day, he grew tired of the alliteration and told his mother that he would like go by his middle name, and he would like it to be shortened to Niko with a “K” rather than “C.”
“Let’s talk to your father about this,” she replied.
Niko’s father returned home that evening. He was a linesman for the Central Maine Power Company. He had never worked elsewhere, never considered working elsewhere, and was always comforted by the knowledge that Maine weather was so bad he would never go a day without a line to hang or a pole to fix. He was smart, but uncurious. Kind, but rarely affectionate. He never cussed at you, but he did not shy away from profanity. He never considered painting his opinions with a diplomatic brush. He felt that a snapshot, unfiltered, was the best course, as he valued the direct truth above all else — except maybe electricity.
Niko explained his request over the dinner table. His father didn’t look up from his stew, but said, “You have to be present at conception in order to have a say in the naming of a person. Your name is Charlie. Eating your fucking potatoes and do your homework.”
“What is conception?”
“It is when one life begins, and two others end,” his father said.
His mother — who Niko learned later in life was much more head-strong, and rebellious than his father — was also much more refined and polished than the grizzled linesman. She looked across the table at his father and shook her head.
“Don’t talk like that in front of him,” she said.
“Huh?” Niko looked at his mother.
“It is when a mom and a dad get pregnant,” she said softly.
Niko had a puzzled look on his face. “From successful sex,” she said for further clarity.
“I guess I was there then,” Niko smiled.
His father grinned. “In a way you were. But you’re still goddamn Charlie Chamonix. Named after your great-grandfather up in Canada. He sailed over from Bordeaux.” His father dropped his spoon and it clanged against the bowl. “He was the finest fur trapper within a hundred miles before a damn mountain lion bit one of his testicles off. After that he was afraid to go into the woods, so he sold candles. The Chamonix family been in the business of providing light ever since.”
“Has that story ever been verified by someone outside of the Chamonix family?” his mother asked.
“A Chamonix never lies. Never have, never will. It is gospel.” His father still looked down at the stew.
His mother rolled her eyes. “Well, maybe you remember breaking your father’s fishing rod when we were drunk in the woods that time. Did you tell him the truth then?”
“A fib to protect your good name.”
“Have to have a good name in order to protect it,” his mother said and smiled.
“Maybe that’s why I like the woods so much,” Niko interrupted.
“Maybe that is.” His mother patted his leg.
At school the next day, Niko announced his name change to the world. Well, to the three boys with whom he ate lunch.
“How do you get to do that?” a boy asked while unsuccessfully trying to wipe the pink juice-stain from his upper lip.
“I was present for successful sex.”
“How did it feel?” The boys smiled and looked upon him with envy.
“I don’t really remember.”
Everyone outside of his family called him Niko from then on.
Niko was not very interested in school, but he excelled academically because of his natural intellect and independent curiosity. He was never spotted doing homework, studying, or heard discussing school. He was perpetually in the woods, exploring ponds or rivers, or at the library reading obscure books about a range of topics that had no perceivable connection.
His forgetful nature resulted in copious overdue library notices. His mother loved to tell of the time that she received four notices in one bunch of mail. The included titles were “Maps of World War I”, “Dog Breeds of Southeast Asia,” “Frankenstein,” and “1982 Mechanical Guide to Mahindra Tractors.” She searched his room and found the books in a stack under Niko’s bed with handwritten notes on torn pieces of paper stuck throughout each book. The notes said things like “so that’s why!” and “I’ll tell Dad about this,” and the most notable, “I think this will help my idea for the entire world.”
Despite all of the distractions and the apparent lack of effort towards school in anyway, Niko received perfect grades. Many teachers and instructors thought he cheated, but he always responded by saying “a Chamonix never lies.”
The truth was that Niko was just smart in the effortless way that some people are. He applied to Harvard and Bates College and was accepted to both. He received a full scholarship to Bates, so that is where he went. During his first meeting with the course selection counselor, he told the old man that he would major in “biology, mechanical engineering, and philosophy.”
“That is a unique combination,” the old counselor said.
“I’ve thought it through. I want to know where fish might live, how boat motors work, and the cumulative wisdom of the human race — in that order.”
The counselor said he was crazy and Niko replied, “that has been true my entire life, but I am finally interested in school, and I won’t let anyone discourage that.”
He graduated with honors and got a job in Boston testing the breaking point of the tiny chips inside cell phones. He figured that since he dropped his own things often enough, he should be good at this job. By the end of his first week, Niko discovered a number of flaws in construction and testing that eventually saved the company millions of dollars.
He lasted exactly fifteen days dropping cell phones for that technology company before he packed all of his things up and drove south. He fished as much of the east-coast surf as humanly possible and only stopped when the road ran out in Key West where he spent two months spear-fishing, reading Hemingway, and eating grouper sandwiches. He managed to drink more rum and beer than would be expected of an entire ship of bored pirates.
He met a waitress named Sandy who worked at a waterfront bar on Stock Island. The place was situated between a trailer park and the shrimp docks. Niko had grown weary of the tourists in Key West — overlooking the obvious detail that he was in fact one of them — and gravitated to the grumpy sunburned shrimpers who viewed the Keys as a hot and humid work environment rather than a vacation spot.
One night, after he downed no fewer than a dozen Rum Runners, Niko asked Sandy to marry him while she was on shift in the bar. She was kind and laughed it off as a drunken prank. She returned her tray of dirty dishes to the kitchen, and pulled him outside by the garbage.
“You’re a sweet thing, but I ain’t gonna marry you,” she said. “I’m off at ten, come on by my trailer for a goodbye if you are still conscious.”
Niko slept with her one last time, and then he stumbled home — the gravel and palm trees and aqua-blue homes all blurred into one drunken image that smelled of rum and cooked shrimp. He cried for a few hours in his trailer before he fell asleep. The next morning he packed all of his things up and left the keys to continue his explorations.
After the better part of two decades, he returned to Maine and he began guiding backcountry fishing trips. He saved enough money to buy some land near Moosehead Lake. He built a house, a few guest cabins, and a fly shop. He ran his guide service — offering fishing trips only — as he refused to hunt mammals for profit, saying that it felt like cannibalism. That was not a popular sentiment in rural Maine, but he didn’t care.
When people asked why he left such a good job in Boston he would reply, “I couldn’t sleep for all the damn street noise and I can drop phones on my own for free.”
This puzzled people, but no one bothered to point out his flawed logic. Anyone who knew Niko knew that his brain was so damn noisy just by itself, that he would only fare well in places with plenty of fish and plenty of quiet.
“Niko,” Tracey called out as she looked at the Escalade across the street. She was elbow deep in fish blood while standing in front of the grey weathered wooden fish-cleaning station. Nearly every inch of the table was covered in bear claw marks accumulated in the years since Niko had built the thing and run a hose to it. The game warden had pleaded with him numerous times to clean his fish elsewhere “for the safety of himself and the animals.”
Niko had inherited his father’s reputation for absolute blunt truth, but he also acquired his mother’s good sense and filter that he could use to his advantage from time to time — especially because everyone in that area of Maine knew a Chamonix never lied.
He would tell the warden, “I got plans to move the table next spring before the fishing gets going.” When the warden inevitably asked him about it again in the spring, he would say, “my schedule is all booked up with clients, I’ll do it in the fall when the fishing dies down.”
In the evenings, he and Tracey — his domestic partner of about ten years — would sit on the porch, drink from growlers, and watch the bears ravage the table, licking and pawing at the odd tree-like object that tasted like fish. Once Tracey asked, “Why don’t you actually build a new one at the fly shop with all of the other fishing stuff?”
“It’s funny to watch them lick the table. Why the hell would I deprive us of that?”
If a bear ever wandered too close while he and Tracey were cleaning fish they would honk an airhorn, and the curious creature would run away. The neighbor’s kids always thought there was a hidden railroad station in the woods.
In the early years, they used an antique bell to keep the eager bears at a safe distance, but, as familiarity built between all of the mammals involved, the bears developed a Pavlovian response to the ringing. The sound drew them closer to the smell of fish and the promise of the delicious table to lick.
Niko enjoyed this trick, and would often ring the bell just to see the bears and talk to them as if they were pets. One day Tracey returned home to find Niko holding the bell and staring down four bears in the front yard. He was yapping at them and laughing, but they seemed displeased that he had no food for them. Tracey stepped from the vehicle, located the emergency airhorn they kept in the truck, and rang it. The bears jumped and ran into the bushes.
“You’re insane,” Tracey yelled. “No more ringing for bears.”
Niko objected to the change, but the bell was replaced by the airhorn. Niko refused to fully retire the bell and insisted that it remain stored at the cleaning-table in case it was ever needed again.
Niko had authored a nice life for himself there — as if that young boy with the overdue books under his bed had scribbled a short story and jumped right onto the page. He fished when the weather was good, and he drank when the weather was lousy. He was so good at telling stories at the local brewery that they gave him free beer — all he had to do was never tell anyone he got free beer.
He always had a few dollars left at the end of the year, and all he did was fish and drink and tell stories. Niko possessed the unique ability to always be busy, yet never get anything done, and in this, he was somehow celebrated as an anomaly in an area full of so many industrious and self-sufficient people.
“Damn it, Niko,” Tracy called again, looking at the Escalade and still holding perch fillets in both hands. “Where the hell did you put the damn freezer bags?”
“Bears must of took em last night,” he yelled through the screen door.
In fact, there was an adolescent black bear with a torn portion of freezer bag attached to his right paw munching on blueberries on the edge of the yard — an appetizer while he waited for Tracey to vacate her current spot so he could lick the wood.
Niko ran down the front porch stairs with a new box of bags in hand. He opened one and Tracey dropped the fillets in.
“Hey, it was Bob.” Niko was looking at the bear in the bushes. “Look at his paw. He took the plastic bags. Probably trying to take some berries to go.”
Tracey still found these jokes funny, but no longer felt the need to laugh aloud.
“Bob,” Niko called out. “Why you stealing our bags?”
The bear looked up for a moment, grunted, and then went back to eating his berries as another, larger male waddled up and started chewing on the other side of the blueberry bush.
“What a treat! Big Berry Dumpling is having breakfast too. I really think he is the smartest of the bunch.” Niko looked to Tracey for confirmation, but she just waited with two more handfuls of fish.
“I feel a deep connection to that bear.”
“You have a client today?” she asked and nodded her head towards the fly shop.
“No one today, but I am booked up for the later this week.”
“Who the hell is parked over there then? He pulled in at three a.m.”
“How do you know that?”
“I was up and heard a car, and then I saw him out the window.”
“What the hell were you doing up then?”
“You were snoring louder than Big Berry Dumpling after he got into that case of beer and passed out in the yard.”
“You sure?” Niko asked. “I’ve never heard myself snore before.”
“Just go see who it is.”
Niko shook his head. “Today is my off day.”
“Off day? The season is just getting going,” Tracey said. “You spent the winter pretending to tie flies at the brewery. Go do some work.”
“Do you know how many clients and trips I am able to arrange while networking at the brewery?”
“Imagine how many you would book if you weren’t always fooling around.”
“That is exactly why I live this way. So, I have time to fool around.” He grinned at her. She did not return the gesture.
“I’ll go. I’ll go see,” Niko said.
Niko put the bags down and wiped his hands on his brown canvas guide-pants and walked across the street in his navy-blue crocs. The Escalade’s engine was running, and the tinted windows were up. Niko walked past the vehicle and up the wide-planked wooden stairs before he pulled on the door handle. It was still locked. He looked back at the vehicle and waited, but nothing happened.
Tracey was watching from across the street while also keeping an eye on Bob and Big Berry Dumpling. “Someone is in the damn SUV you idiot. Knock on the window.”
“Idiot? I’m the smartest person I know,” he yelled back.
“Then you should be able to figure this one out.”
He walked to the SUV and pressed his face to the window. The engine turned off and Niko stepped back. The door opened, and Bayless sat with his hand shielding his eyes from the light.
“What the hell do you want?” Bayless asked.
“What do I want? I want to know who the hell is sleeping in front of my fly shop?”
Bayless sat up and swung his legs out of the cab. He smelled of stale beer and his eyes were glassy and red. “This is your place?”
Niko nodded.
“Perfect.” Bayless smiled. “You are just the guy I am looking for.”
…
Check in Tuesday for the next episode!