“Including the little incident concerning himself?”
“Well, that may have been as much her doing as his. Those things are never totally one-sided. It takes two, doesn’t it?”
“You’re defending the man.”
“I’m being impartial. Go to sleep.”
Through the following week, Durkin assigned Kroll to a succession of minor tasks which Kroll performed in lackadaisical fashion, or in one instance, not at all. That one involved the meal worms in a covered tray in a corner of the aquarium area. The worms were propagated as food, primarily for the puffers and the candiru.
“Damned if I’ll touch those squirmy things,” Kroll announced, and he stalked out of the building.
“You’ll do as I say!” Durkin shouted after him. But the big man walked on as if Durkin had said nothing at all. A half hour later, Durkin spotted the two of them, Kroll and Felicia, strolling along the riverbank.
“You, sir,” he assailed Kroll at dinner, “are a disgrace to the work of your uncle’s foundation.”
Kroll smiled. “But here I am, Durkin. And Uncle Oliver says here I stay. For a whole goddamn year.” His smile had begun as one of mirth at Durkin’s impotent railing. Now it was one of mockery.
Later, in the darkness after a long silence, Durkin said quietly, “He’s trouble, Felicia, and you’re... not helping.”
From her side of the muggy room, he heard nothing.
“Felicia?”
He felt her weight on the edge of his creaky cot.
“He’s just a big boy in a man’s body, Emmett. Try to understand him.”
She thrust the mosquito netting aside. “He amuses me, but you’re my husband.” Which struck Durkin as a peculiar way to put it, and what ensued seemed more palliative than passionate.
“You will bear in mind,” Durkin told Kroll in the lab a week later, “she is my wife.” As soon as he had said that, he realized how ludicrous it must have sounded to this hulking playboy. If Durkin had been the six-foot-one, two-hundred-pounder, and if he had snarled, “She is my wife!” at a hundred-forty-pound, chicken-boned Kroll, it would have come off as dramatic. But the actuality of Kroll towering over him while he squawked up at the man made the implied threat toothless. Even comical.
“Don’t scare me, prof.” A grin displayed Kroll’s beautifully capped teeth. “Hey, listen, I’m not going to sweep, saw, or pick worms today, okay? Time for a day off. Mind if I borrow the canoe or dugout or whatever that thing is down there at the dock?”
“Yes, I do mind.”
“I thought you would,” Kroll said amiably, and he walked out.
“Come back here!” Durkin fumed. Then he got hold of himself. Another couple of minutes, and Kroll would have had him shaking his finger and stamping his foot. To hell with the man. Surely he could trust Felicia to... not to... Hadn’t she called Kroll a mere boy?
He went about his lab work with more equanimity than he had felt for days. When Kroll had not reappeared by lunchtime, he didn’t find that disturbing. With luck, the man had fallen out of the boat, and piranhas had picked him to the bone. Except that Durkin had seen no trace of that deadly little scavenger in this vicinity.
When Felicia also failed to appear at the mess hut, Durkin decided to take a not-so-casual stroll along the riverbank. Just as he reached the drop-off, he spotted them exiting the dugout. He stepped back so that he was hidden from below by the crest of the bank. The man’s got me spying on my own wife, he realized guiltily. Then his guilt turned to futile anger. Felicia’s bright frock (where did that come from?) had merged with Kroll’s suntans. They were embracing down there!
Live and let live? Through lunch, Durkin found himself assailed by anger, frustration, then disillusionment — with Felicia, and with his own sense of leadership. He was in charge here. Yet Kroll, an inferior example of manhood if ever there was one, and his own wife, whose superior intellect had captivated Durkin in the first place, showed signs of running amok. And Durkin found himself powerless to do anything about it.
Then the Indians sensed what was afoot here. Until now, the four older ones had never turned their backs on him. Even when they had been hard at work and he approached, they’d managed to face him respectfully until he had nodded and passed by. Now, except when he was directly addressing them, he found himself pointedly ignored.
Agata had been less subservient than they, but she had managed to convey respect through her tiny, ever-present smile. But now she had erased that pleasantry. Her bittersweet chocolate eyes seemed to pierce his, to spear straight into his brain and find cravenness there.
He was a marine biologist, not an expert in conjugal relations. He had no idea what to do, so he did nothing.
Next, Kroll didn’t bother to appear in the research building at all. He sunbathed on the rustic verandah, he strolled around the compound. He disappeared for hours, and Durkin noticed more and more frequently, so did Felicia. Along the river in the dugout? Down the path that led to the Bororo village? Maybe even to some secluded place here on the grounds? Where they went had to remain a mystery because Durkin refused to lower himself to searching for them.
He asked Agata to return to her former part-time chore of research building housecleaning and was gratified that she accepted without a sign of protest.
At length, Felicia didn’t seem to care whether Durkin noticed her barely suppressed state of newfound excitement, her frequently flushed face, her often-rumpled clothing. The two of them surely knew he knew, and he was further depressed that they apparently weren’t concerned.
He felt he faced two dismal choices: confrontation, which he would undoubtedly lose; had already, in fact, lost. Or endurance. Surely Felicia’s innate intelligence would surmount her infatuation with this physically attractive — to her — novelty who had enlivened her boring existence here. Durkin could even relate to that. He had his absorbing work, but she’d had... what? An abortive try at a first novel which now mildewed somewhere in a residence building storage closet. Then she had begun to catalog fauna that she observed in the clearing. That, too, died in the endless days of compressing heat and sudden, drenching rainfalls. Now she had Alexander Kroll. Another fad, Durkin could hope.
For two more weeks, Station 4 endured a balance of tensions. Durkin’s gripping anger was mitigated by the interesting fact that Felicia still came to him occasionally, and he even found quirky stimulation in that apparent atonement for her fascination with Kroll.
Further offsetting Durkin’s hatred of Kroll was the man’s obvious physical superiority. In bare-knuckled conflict, Heaven forbid, Durkin knew he would quickly be reduced to mincemeat.
Perhaps he could conceivably devise some nonconfrontational means of settling with his now detested “assistant.” A slice of Gulf puffer liver slipped into Kroll’s fish stew? But murder was not in Durkin’s soul.
The Indians now pointedly faced away whenever he neared. They took his orders, they did their work, but they would not show him their faces. Except Agata. She could hardly work the mess hut without facing its diners, but her fetching little smile had suffered an apparently permanent death. Her expression now was one of stone.
He could live with that. He could live with the backs of the other Bororos giving him what constituted a version of continuous jungle “mooning.” He could even live with Kroll’s refusal to do anything at all by way of useful work. He would survive Felicia’s fling, and Kroll’s high-handed relationship with her. Because he had to, and because this wasn’t Philadelphia. It was the Amazon riverbank, three hundred miles from anything real, and they had all become sunstruck. Heat-driven. Crazy.