Then Kroll did something that upset the uneasy dynamics of Station 4. He did it one evening at dinner, after he and Felicia had been missing most of the afternoon. What he did probably did not seem to him to be more than adolescent teasing. But to Durkin, it was an unpardonable bombshell.
Kroll wiped his mouth, settled back in his groaning wood-slat chair, chuckled to himself.
And he said to Durkin, “I understand they used to call you ‘Turkey.’ Haw-haw-haw.”
Durkin felt blood rise over his limp shirt collar, race along his jaw, and suffuse his cheeks with crimson.
“Haw-haw! Gotcha, Turkey,” Kroll blathered. “Has a nice ring: ‘Turkey Durkin.’ ”
Durkin glanced at Felicia. She smiled at Kroll. She had told Kroll!
God, how Durkin had hated that nickname. All nicknames. In private grade school, a nine-year-old lump had called him “Emmy.” Durkin was undersized, with a piping little voice. The more he protested, the worse it got until the whole school was chanting, “Emmy, Emmy, your name is femmy!”
In public high school, he was for a time free of the taunts of what he had considered the snobbish rich kids. Then some wag came up with “Spider,” all too appropriate for a skinny runt with toothpick arms and legs. He lived miserably with that all the way to graduation. Then he left it behind with a sense of relief when he entered U. of P. Whereupon another mental Visigoth struck upon the euphonious “Turkey.” Turkey Durkin did have a catchy ring. It stuck with him all four years, followed him through graduate studies. Then he’d thought he’d left it at the University of Florida — where he had met Felicia Noonan, coincidentally from Philadelphia. She had never used the horrible nickname.
Yet now she had told Kroll, and they had unified to ridicule him. That hit Durkin like an icicle plunged straight down his throat to explode into frigid shards deep in his gut.
But as his hands gripped his chair arms in a rictus of fury, he realized he was as incapable of standing up to this chortling lout as he had been of confronting his tormentors from the age of nine.
Perhaps Felicia was putting him to a test, something she may have concocted from equal parts of boredom, Durkin’s gradual transferral of passion from her to his work — he had unconsciously been doing that, hadn’t he — and the availability of Kroll. She had escalated the challenge from obvious attraction to the man, through stages of increasing intimacy, to out-and-out infidelity. Durkin had done nothing. Now she was employing, through Kroll, raw derision. At last, Durkin had found that unendurable.
But though he now seethed with fury, he was still the same man behind it, a man unable to assail Kroll head-on, and just as incapable of waylaying him along the Station’s latrine path and firing a bullet into his heart. In fact, there was no firearm available. Durkin wouldn’t hear of it. A spear? Surely one of the Indians would be able to provide one. But the thought of even the likes of Kroll twisting on the end of a length of hardwood pole turned Durkin’s blood cold.
Now Felicia and Kroll flaunted their affaire Amazonia, as Durkin had bitterly termed it to himself. One late afternoon, when he had trudged across the compound from the research building, he heard laughter. Felicia’s giggles, then Kroll’s deeper chuckle. This, from behind the screening of the oversized rain tub. They were in the thing together, their clothing hung over the woven screen panels like defiant flags.
A surge of hot fury made Durkin’s head thunder. Unendurable, that laughter. Simply unendurable. His lists knotted. His throat threatened to close. Yet he strode away.
At supper, she clung to Kroll’s arm, all pretense now dissolved in the rain forest’s fetid air.
“What’s for dinner, Turkey?” Kroll boomed, and they were shaken by helpless laughter, drunk on each other. She had passed over the line, out of Durkin’s life into Kroll’s. If life had a way of balancing inequities, Durkin thought, surely such a balance was long overdue.
Then the evening rains, as predictable as sunset in this post-flood-season month, stopped. The water in the run-off tank that served as their jungle hot tub grew algae-ridden and dank. On Durkin’s order, one of the Indians drained it.
Yet, several afternoons later, Durkin heard splashing and mirth from behind the screening.
“Had the Indians fill it with buckets from the river,” Kroll blithely told him at supper. Now the man had even taken over compound management; ordered the Indians to fill the tank with river water...
When he heard Felicia’s first shrill scream, Durkin looked up from the volt meter on the Electrophorus’s aquarium. When Kroll’s hoarse yell joined in, and the Indians began to lope across the compound toward the rear of the residence building, Durkin set down his notes and trotted out of the lab.
By the time he reached the screened-off tank, all five of the Bororos had crowded inside, between the tank and the screening, all of them jabbering but uncertain as to what to do about the naked, panic-stricken white man and woman thrashing in the murky water.
“God Almighty!” Kroll screeched at Durkin, “get us out of here!” The man’s face contorted in a grimace of terror. He was still coherent, but his words were overridden by Felicia’s hysterical screams.
On Durkin’s order, the two male Indians began to hoist Kroll from the murky water. As he emerged, the shouts of the Bororos merged into an eerie chant, three syllables, over and over.
“What...” Kroll managed through clenched teeth, “what’s... ‘candy-roo’?” Then he pawed himself frantically. “Oh, God!”
“ ‘Candiru,’ they’re saying,” Durkin told him over Felicia’s cries. “The little catfish I tried to explain to you in the lab. They burrow straight into any body opening, and because of their rear-facing barbs, they can be removed only by surgery.”
“Jesus! In this tank? How—” Kroll’s question disintegrated in a pain-wracked moan.
“Incredible,” Durkin said. “To all of us, I’m sure.”
The two of them were hauled out, naked and writhing, wrapped in blankets, and carried into the residence. A day later, summoned by the emergency radio, a fast outboard from Oriximina picked them up to return them to the small airstrip there. By then, Kroll and Felicia were pitifully weak, fever-wracked, only semi-coherent. With prompt surgical attention in Belem, though, they would at least live.
In a week, perhaps several, the state of Para would send an investigator. Durkin could almost hear the conversation now.
“You say, señor, the Bororos filled the tank from the river. Very careless.”
“They did as they were ordered.”
“By you, Señor Durkin?”
“No, by Mr. Kroll.”
“I see. Unfortunate that the Bororos did not notice the candiru in their buckets.”
“The river is always muddy here. See for yourself.”
“Si, you are right.” The inspector would shrug. “An accident. And Senor Kroll seems to have brought it about by his ignorance.”
And that would be that.
The day after the fast boat had rushed Kroll and Felicia eastward, the compound seemed to exist in suspended animation. Agata arrived glum-faced to clean the research building, strode past Durkin as if he didn’t exist, seized the broom and began to work her way along the row of aquariums.
Then she stopped, and bent down to peer into the candiru tank.
In accented English, she said, “Empty? Tank empty?”
Durkin gazed at her, his face as impassive as that of any of the Bororos.
Shortly, she left the research building to prepare his lunch. When he crossed the compound toward the mess hut an hour later, the two male Indians suddenly turned from the work on the generator shack’s loose door hinge and faced him respectfully.