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

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.

That was a welcome change.

In the mess hut, when Agata brought in his broiled fish, her smile had returned. As she leaned down to set the plate at his place, her breast softly brushed his shoulder, something that had never happened before. He found that quite heartwarming.

Even exciting.

The Model

by Joyce Carol Oates