Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

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.

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.