“Where’s Manaus?”
“By river, three hundred miles west.”
“Jesus.”
The deckhand plunked down the bags and gave Kroll a burlesque salute, a lopsided grin, and muttered something that didn’t sound complimentary.
“What did he say? I don’t speak Spanish.”
“Neither does he. That was the Portuguese equivalent of ‘Have a nice day.’ ”
Kroll looked around as if he were expecting to summon a bellman, then he gave a whistling sigh, bent down and hefted his two bags. They walked down the path from the riverbank, Durkin in the lead, Kroll puffing behind.
“Jesus!” Kroll said again, this time with more vehemence. Durkin knew his unasked-for assistant had just gotten his first real look at Station 4.
“This is all there is to it? This clearing at the edge of the jungle?”
“Research building on the right, mess hut straight ahead, storage and generator buildings between.” Durkin nodded at the weather-faded, clapboard building to their left, a long, low, shedlike structure. “Living quarters. Felicia and I are in the near side. You can take your stuff to the other end.”
“I heard your wife is here with you. When do I meet the ‘little woman’?”
Now that struck Durkin as just about the patronizing limit. He’d already had it with this Philadelphia philanderer, had it at first glance. He instinctively disliked anyone that much taller than his own five-foot-seven. Moreover, Kroll had the good looks of a men’s sleepwear model, a distressing contrast to Durkin’s sallow boniness. Even in his soiled chinos, Kroll managed to project a debonair aura, an effect peculiarly enhanced by his hard-traveled appearance. Durkin’s trousers and shirt-sleeves seemed to flap around his skinny limbs even in the still air of the rain forest.
A faint odor of spice drifted among the fetid smells of the river and the underlying stink of rotting vegetation. Kroll’s shaving lotion, for God’s sake, and this late in the day.
“The little woman,” Kroll had said, as if the likes of Durkin would attract only the kind of mousy, vapid, workaday wife that trite expression anticipated.
“She will join us at supper. Right now, it’s siesta time for her.”
The whole station, in fact, was asleep: Felicia, the two stolid male Bororo Indians (Durkin thought they were Bororos, but in a country that had encouraged racial intermarriage for decades, it was hard to be precise), the pair of equally impassive middle-aged Indian females, and Agata, the younger, almost pretty, Bororo girl in her twenties, the best worker of the five.
Employer to employee, Durkin showed Kroll to his barren quarters, pointed out the screened-off wooden tank that served as their bathtub when the run-off from the roof was enough to fill it, and left the man to settle in until suppertime.
“I thought I heard the steamer leaving,” Felicia murmured sleepily from inside the mosquito netting tent over her cot. “Is he here?”
“He’s here.”
“Is he what you expected?”
“Exactly.” Durkin sat back in one of their creaky wooden chairs and watched her doze again. When he had literally run into her at the University of Florida during his graduate studies, she had looked like an English Lit major — which she had turned out to be, with an IQ way up there. That had appealed to him only minutes after they had clashed cafeteria trays. He saw right past the beesting breasts and bony hips beneath her bag of a dress. He liked her for her brain, which electrified her. And which was why, when he asked her two months later to marry him, she breathed a fervent, “Oh, yes!”
Intimacy was new to Durkin, and he liked its novelty, but not all the mental strain that went with it. Felicia Noonan Durkin was not an easy coupler. She wanted her moments of culmination to be bracketed by persuasive forehappenings and lengthy afterglows. All of which seriously paled for Durkin after a few months. He loved her, sure, but... He was aware that she lamented the fast fade of their initial bliss.
Then, one year to the day from the date of their marriage, they found themselves up the Amazon. Literally. Five hundred miles from the northeast coast.
“And six hundred miles south of Paramaribo. A thousand miles from Rio,” she had lamented when the asthmatic river steamer had bumped them ashore. The research station’s frame structures would have failed the lowest of Pocono Mountain summer camp standards. The five Indian assistants were day workers who had the good sense to return to their own no doubt more comfortable village a mile southward, along a rank path Durkin was never to have the slightest impulse to explore.
The Durkins replaced a scraggly, bearded skeleton named Warnowski, a wreck of a Ph.D. who had been sent here by the foundation the year before. His specialty was supposed to have been the freshwater stingray, but observation told Durkin it now was the pinch-bottle. Not long after the steamer, with Warnowski aboard, chugged out of sight around the sharp bend to the east, they found an unopened bottle of Haig & Haig behind the tattered linens in the residency cupboard. Durkin poured the Scotch onto the spongy ground behind the building.
A year here had changed them both. With little to do in the oppressive climate, Felicia grew lethargic, but at the same time she blossomed like a lush, tropical flower. The bony hips filled out. The pathetic little breast buds blossomed. Unexpectedly, Durkin found himself drawn to a soft, warm, compelling female. He liked the surprising excitement of that, and he liked his work for the foundation. After he learned something of the ways of the Bororos, he liked them, too. Everything here had fallen satisfyingly into place for him.
Now the heavy hand of nepotism in far-off Pennsylvania threatened to, well, screw it up with the mandated arrival of Alexander Kroll.
The big man from Philadelphia ambled into the mess hut fifteen minutes after Agata, slender and sleek in brightly dyed homespun, had served a thin fish soup.
“I thought in South America, you ate late,” were his first words.
“We eat early so the Indians can get to their village before dark,” Durkin informed him. But Kroll was not listening.
“So this is the missus. Well, well, well. A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Durkin.”
“Please, Felicia, Mr. Kroll.”
“And I will be most happy if you will call me Alex.” He seemed to be undergoing a transition to smooth civility as Durkin watched.
“The menu for tonight?” Kroll asked her.
“Fish broth and—” She spoke with the hovering Agata in rapid Portuguese, which she had picked up with little trouble, then turned back to Kroll. “Roast pork and manioc. With papaya for dessert.”
“Impressive, here in the middle of nowhere.”
Felicia smiled at Kroll’s compliment, obviously enjoying her unaccustomed gracious hostess role. “Agata spent a few years in Manaus. She was a chef’s assistant at the Restaurante Palhoca. We’re very fortunate.”
The delicious aroma of roast pork loin, carved from a wild boar the two Indian men had speared in honor of the occasion, provided a veneer of civilization in the raw hut. But it was abruptly shattered by a hair-raising screech across the broad river.
“Jaguar. Getting ready for the hunt. They hardly ever get over this side.” Durkin said that perfunctorily because he had just realized something that was a lot more disturbing than a jaguar’s evening scream. He had just been struck by the fact that since Kroll had entered the mess hut, his speculative slate-blue gaze had never once wavered from Felicia until the jaguar’s shriek had split the outside silence.
“Breakfast at seven,” Durkin said coldly. “In the lab at seven-thirty. I’ll teach you what I can.”
Kroll was not a morning person, Durkin decided. At breakfast, the man met Durkin’s “Good morning” with no more than a surly nod. In silence, he downed two cups of Agata’s excellent arabica coffee in an apparent effort to jolt himself fully awake. Then he leaned back in his camp chair and stared up at the underside of the thatched roof.