— Niko and Bayless finally clash in a brutal fight–
Niko stood and swung the oar in a single swift motion, but Bayless was ready. He ducked and leaned with the boat and the oar flew out of Niko’s hand. Bayless raised the gun and shot.
Niko heard the gunshot. He looked to his torso but felt nothing and saw no blood.
He heard Bayless curse as he stumbled and slipped to one knee in the bucking boat — he was off balance and had somehow missed the close-range shot. Niko didn’t have time to be thankful as he saw Bayless raising his arm once again.
Niko jumped onto him, grabbing for the gun. They grappled like uncoordinated high school wrestlers in the shifting boat. There was another shot, but it missed again as Niko held Bayless’s arm and the muzzle pointed away from his own body.
Niko slammed his foe’s arm on the back of the seat, but Bayless didn’t drop the weapon. Bayless grimaced at the physical strain, but his eyes showed no fear nor any emotion Niko could detect. The fight was slow and ugly, and the two men were quickly breathing hard, muttering curses and grunting unintelligible things.
Niko gritted his teeth and stood for a moment and slammed Bayless’s arm down again. This time he kept pressing down, pinning the arm against the seat, pressing all of his weight, feeling the bone strain on the plastic ridge. He kept his eyes on Bayless’s free hand as it punched and flailed.
Niko lifted again, coming dangerously close to allowing the barrel to come within the arc of his body, and he slammed downward. This time Bayless dropped the gun and it slid the full length of the fiberglass deck to the bow.
Bayless, now released from the pin, swung and hit Niko in the jaw, and Niko stumbled, nearly falling overboard. He regained his balance, lunged back and punched the side of Bayless’s head. He saw his hand break on Bayless’s skull. Niko’s adrenaline was rolling, and he couldn’t feel his hand, but he could see where the bones were misplaced.
Bayless grabbed the other oar and swung. Niko absorbed the blow with his arms, but still felt the force full and hard. He tripped over the gunwale and splashed into the water head first. The coldness took his breath, and he nearly inhaled water as he flailed and grasped for the boat — simultaneously fearing the man inside of it, but knowing any distance between them would just allow Bayless to get closer to Tracey.
Niko rose to the surface and gasped and saw the boat, but didn’t see Bayless. He scanned the water, looking for the man bobbing. He feared he may be underwater, swimming towards him. Then Bayless popped his head over the gunwale, gun now in hand and aimed at Niko.
He shot, but the bullet whizzed past Niko’s head. Niko dove back down, swimming as deep as possible, seeing the white lines of foam, tracing the bullets. There was no safe place to surface, so he swam under the boat and held on.
He felt the boat shift back and forth above him as Bayless leaned from side to side looking for him.
Niko’s lungs burned, but he could not leave the boat. He could not allow this man to find Tracey. So he slid back towards the motor, waiting as long as he could, and then as delicately as a brown trout rising to a spent fly, Niko pressed his mouth through the surface film and gulped the air. He could see the top of Bayless’s head, searching side to side as they drifted towards the landing. Niko knew that landing was well marked and that Bayless would have no trouble figuring where he was and how to get back to the fly shop from there.
Niko felt the flow of the river quicken and he saw Bayless lean over towards the back, and peer down right at him. Bayless smiled and pointed the gun, but before he could shoot, Niko bucked the boat as hard as he could and Bayless stumbled back, and they hit the small set of rapids just upstream from the landing.
Niko smashed into a boulder and was dislodged from the boat. He tumbled through the hydraulics cursing his luck as he caught glimpses of the boat floating through the churning water, the distance between him and the vessel increasing. Bayless was shooting blindly into the water, and Niko had no choice but to simply float with the river and hope.
The shooting stopped, and Niko floated and watched the landing pass by. He tried to remember how many shots had been fired. Useless though, he didn’t even know how many rounds the clip held.
Bayless was struggling to control the boat and did not see Niko as he swam to the bank just downstream of the landing. Bayless and the boat collided with one of the mooring posts and he was able to wedge the boat between two boulders. Then he scanned the river. It was clear that he still did not see where Niko was. He scanned and waited as Niko lay in the shallow water downstream behind a log, eyes and mouth just above the surface like an alligator.
What is he waiting for?
Bayless’s heavy breathing slowed as the oddly still game of chicken developed. He showed no emotion, and simply scanned the river, his glance increasingly directed down-stream.
Niko counted the seconds that felt like hours, remaining perfectly still even as a snake slithered past his face. He waited and waited, watching as Bayless began looking around the boat. He reached down and moved a number of things. Niko felt violated seeing him in that boat alone.
Bayless pulled up his duffle bag. He checked that it was still closed, looking up every few seconds like a predator eating its kill midst a group of scavengers.
Niko knew the next move, and his heart broke because he knew he couldn’t stop it, not from that position in the water facing a gunman on solid ground.
A slim chance is better than no chance, and to charge was insanity. Perhaps it would have felt more noble, but it would have just meant death for Tracey as well. He knows I’m dead or hiding. And he knows I’ll follow if he makes his way to Tracey.
Niko watched as Bayless hopped out of the boat with the bag and the gun in hand. He took one last look over the river and then disappeared into the woods.
It was less than a quarter of a mile to the house, and as soon as Bayless vanished into the trees, Niko climbed from his hiding spot and darted through the brush. He stumbled and fell over deadfall and into boggy thickness and stagnant oily pools. He cursed the very ground that he loved as each delayed step he took was a moment more for Bayless to race away from him.
Finally, Niko burst through the brush and onto the gravel road that led from the landing to the main road. He was loud and exposed and began running down the road, following the fading wet foot prints heading back towards town. He didn’t care if Bayless was waiting around the next bend gun raised or hiding behind a tree. His only thoughts were of Tracey back at their little house.
She would be distracted with something in the yard or shaking her head and repairing a thing that Niko had long forgotten to attend to — the chipping paint on the window trim, the old hose that needed to be thrown away. That was how she filled her time when she was mad at him. Distracted from her art and her writing, just tinkering and waiting for him to return from whatever foolish errand he had embarked on.
He thought of the menace out in front of him, running towards her. His lungs were burning and his head was throbbing from the blows from the fight, but he kept on as fast as he could. Trying so hard to catch something he knew he could not, but he would not stop trying.
He hoped to see Bayless in the trees or standing in the path with the pistol, but he knew Bayless was too far ahead. The boggy delay was too much. He would not risk a fight in the woods when he knew Niko would come running up like a lost puppy anyway. Niko tried to turn his mind off. But he could not escape the fact that his lie and his choice to go out with that man, that his blindness to that badness was going to kill all that he loved.
His mind flashed the image of Tracey, shot and laying in front of the house he had built. He couldn’t turn his mind off to those things as he ran and followed the wet foot marks as fast as he could.
He was still a few minutes from the house when he heard the unmistakable sound of the screen door slam.
Either she came out or he went in.
He kept running, waiting to hear the fateful shot, or a scream. His soul crumbled as his body pushed on. Running and waiting. Waiting to absorb the enormity of the tragic moment. Tears mingled with sweat on his face.
Then he heard it.
A bell, clear and light, the sound floating through the trees like a kind invitation to dinner. He smiled for a moment and ran on.
The bell rang again, and then there was a pause and a shot, and deep guttural screams for a moment. Then silence, and Niko could hear nothing but his breath and his feet on the gravel.
Niko emptied out of the woods and saw Tracey standing at the fish table looking at Big Berry Dumpling hunched over a crumbled form. Tracey rang the airhorn and the bear took off for the bushes, but the form did not move.
Niko sprinted across the street and looked at Bayless’s body on the ground laying in the patch of grass about ten feet from the fish cleaning table, mauled and torn open but still clutching the pistol and the duffle bag. Undoubtedly dead.
Then he walked to Tracey and crumbled at her feet. Hugging her legs, smiling, crying, shaking, heaving from the exertion. “Are you okay?”
“I am,” Tracey said. Her calmness was striking next to Niko’s wild dishevelment, but as Niko stood and hugged her, he could feel Tracey’s heart pounding through her chest. Her voice was soft and vacant. “I’m fine.”
Niko pulled back from Tracey and looked at her. She was crying now and shaking and looking back and forth from Bayless to Niko.
“What happened?” Niko asked.
“He said there was an accident. I could see blood on his face and his clothes. He wanted to go inside to call for help. I asked him why he had a gun and he wouldn’t answer, so I told him I wouldn’t go inside with him.”
She started to hit Niko and she screamed at him. “How could you do that to me again? Go out there and do that and put me through that?”
Niko had nothing to say. He just hugged her, and he would have understood if she ran away, but she let him hug her. And he just repeated “I’m sorry.”
“When I told him he couldn’t go inside, he said that you wouldn’t be back and that I could either walk inside or be dragged inside by my hair.
“Then I thought about you, and this table and how much I would miss you and how you talk to the bears and how much you thought Big Berry Dumpling was the smartest. Then he came right up to me, and I knew that if I went in the house, I would not come out. So I just swung on him. I hit his head and I ran.”
Niko held her shoulders as he looked right at her.
“He ran after me, and lunged and grabbed my leg, but I was already at the table. I grabbed that stupid bell and rang it. Then that fat ass bear came running up, and then I swear he knew what was happening. He charged like he was angry, and that man tried to shoot him, but the bear was already on him by the time he fired. Big Berry Dumpling crushed him and tore him open. Then you ran up and I rang the horn so Dumpling didn’t keep at the body.”
“I told you he was the smartest one.”
Niko walked over to Bayless’ corpse and kicked the gun from his mangled hand.
“He would have killed you and Mossy and anyone else here who saw him and then come back for me.”
The odd calmness of Tracey’s shock fell away and she crumbled to the ground sobbing. The emotion of losing Niko once again, of fearing for her life, of watching a man die, and of getting Niko back once again was too much. She cried and Niko picked her up and carried her to the porch.
He walked back to the body, there by the fish cleaning table. There was a blue tarp folded under the table. Niko picked it up and placed it over Bayless. He couldn’t think of what else to do.
Niko was walking back to the porch when he heard an engine in the distance coming up the road from the south. He turned and saw a dark blue SUV in the distance, and he groaned when he saw the rack of police lights on top.
Niko looked at the blue tarp, laying like a blanket over a pile of unfolded laundry. He quickly weighed the edges down with a few loose bricks that had been sitting under the fish cleaning table and began walking back to the porch.
He did not look, but he heard the SUV stop in front of the house. A door closed. Niko turned to see Sherriff Reynolds standing in front of the driver’s side door.
“Hey there Niko,” he called out.
“Hey there sheriff.” Niko waved and smiled. Keeping his broken hand at his side, out of Reynold’s sight line. “What can I do for you?”
“Got a report about some gunshots sounding off around here.”
“Well, lots of people are hunting out here. It is Maine.”
“Why you all wet?”
“I fell in the river.”
Reynolds nodded and looked at Niko for a few seconds. “Your hand alright?” He pointed to Niko’s side.
“Just banged it up when I fell in. Been a rough day for me.” Niko smiled.
“Reports said the shots didn’t sound like a rifle or a shotgun. Said it sounded like a handgun. You know anything about that?”
Niko shook his head. “No sheriff, we haven’t heard a thing.”
. . .
I am very sorry about the delayed release of this episode! Check in soon for the final episode of The Chamonix Chronicles!