“Sorry please,” he says, yanking the lever, trying to get the door open again.
“Don’t worry, I’m in no hurry,” she says, giving him a little laugh.
She sees a man between the parking lot and the gate to the park, a man like the man at her hotel, in a plain green uniform, automatic rifle on his back.
“Is the gun for the animals, or the people?” she asks.
“People,” Godwill says, with a small laugh. “People much more dangerous than animals!” Then he laughs and laughs and laughs.
It’s about forty-five degrees, Rita guesses, though it could be fifty. And the rain. It’s raining steadily, and the rain is cold. Rita hadn’t thought about rain. When she had pictured the hike she had not thought about cold, cold, steady rain.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves some rain,” Frank says.
The paying hikers look at him.
“No two ways about it,” he says.
Everything is moving rapidly. Bags are being grabbed, duffels hoisted. There are so many porters! Everyone is already wet. Patrick is talking with a group of the porters. They are dressed in bright colors, like the paying hikers, but their clothes — simple pants and sweatshirts — are already dirty, and their shoes are not large and complicated boots, as Rita is wearing, but instead sneakers, or track shoes, or loafers. None wear rain gear, but all wear hats.
Now there is animated discussion, and some pointing and shrugging. One porter jumps to the ground and then lies still, as if pretending to be dead. The men around him roar.
Rita ducks into her poncho and pulls it over her torso and backpack. The poncho was a piece of equipment the organizers listed as optional; no one, it seems, expected this rain. Now she is thrilled she bought it—$4.99 at Target on the way to the airport. She sees a few of the porters poking holes in garbage bags and fitting themselves within. Grant is doing the same. He catches Rita looking at him.
“Forgot the poncho,” he says. “Can’t believe I forgot the poncho.”
“Sorry,” she says. There is nothing else to say. He’s going to get soaked.
“It’s okay,” he says. “Good enough for them, good enough for me.”
Rita tightens the laces on her boots and readjusts her gaiters. She helps Shelly with her poncho, spreading it over her backpack, and arranges her hood around her leonine hair, frayed and thick, blond and white. As she pulls the plastic close to Shelly’s face, they stare into each other’s eyes and Rita has a sharp pain in her stomach, or her head, somewhere. She wants them here. They are her children and she allowed them to be taken. People were always quietly taking things from her, always with the understanding that everyone would be better off if Rita’s life were kept simplified. But she was ready for complication, wasn’t she? For a certain period of time, she was, she knows. It was the condominium that concerned everyone; she had almost bought one, in anticipation of adopting the kids, and she had backed out — but why? — just before closing. The place wasn’t right; it wasn’t big enough. She wanted it to be more right; she wanted to be more ready. It wasn’t right, and the kids and her own parents would know it, and they would think she would always be insolvent, and they would always have to share a room. Gwen had offered to co-sign on the other place, the place they looked at with the yard and the three bedrooms, but that wouldn’t be right, having Gwen on the mortgage. So she had given up and the kids were now in her old room, with her parents. She wants them walking next to her asking her advice. She wants to arrange their hoods around their faces, wants to pull the drawstrings so their faces shrink from view and stay dry. Shelly’s face is old and lined and she grins at Rita and clears her throat.
“Thank you, hon,” she says.
They are both waterproof now and the rain tick-ticks onto the plastic covering them everywhere. The paying hikers are standing in the parking lot in the rain.
“Porters have dropped out,” says Frank, speaking to the group. “They gotta replace the porters who won’t go up. It’ll take a few minutes.”
“Are there replacements close by?” Shelly asks.
“Probably get some younger guys,” Frank says. “The younger guys are hungry.”
“Like the B-team, right?” Jerry says. “We’re getting the B-TEAM!” He looks around for laughs but no one’s wet cold face will smile. “Minor leaguers, right?” he says, then gives up.
It is much too late to go home now, Rita knows. Still, she can’t suppress the thought of running all the way, ten miles or so, mostly downhill, back to the hotel, at which point she would — no matter what the cost — fly to warm and flat Zanzibar, to drink and drink until half-blind in the sun.
Nearby in the parking lot, Patrick seems to settle something with the man he’s speaking to and approaches the group.
“Very wet,” he says, with a grimace. “Long day.”
The group is going to the peak, a four-day trip up, two down, along the Machame Route. There are at least five paths up the mountain, depending on what a hiker wants to see and how quickly they want to reach the top, and Gwen had promised that this route was within their abilities and by far the most scenic. The group’s members each signed up through a web-site, EcoHeaven Tours, dedicated to adventure travel. The site promised small group tours of a dozen places — the Scottish highlands, the Indonesian lowlands, the rivers of upper Russia. The trip up this mountain was, oddly enough, the least exotic-sounding. Rita has never known anyone who had climbed Kilimanjaro, but she knew people who knew people who had, and this made it just that small bit less intriguing. Now, standing below the gate, this trip seems irrelevant, irrational, indefensible. She’s walking the same way thousands have before, and she will be cold and wet while doing so.
“Okay, let’s saddle up,” Frank says, and begins to walk up a wide dirt path. Rita and the four others walk with him. Rita is glad, at least, to be moving, because moving will make her warm. They are all in ponchos, Grant in his garbage bag, all with backpacks beneath, resembling hunchbacks, or soldiers. She pictures the Korean War Memorial, all those young men, cast in bronze, eyes wide, waiting to be shot.
But Frank is walking very slowly. Rita is behind him; his pace is elephantine. Such measured movements, such lumbering effort. Frank is leading the five of them, with Patrick at the back of the group, and the porters are now distantly behind them, still in the parking lot, gathering the duffels and propane tanks and tents. They will catch up, Patrick said.
Rita is sure that this pace will drive her mad. She is a racquetball player because racquetball involves movement, and scoring, and noise, and the possibility of getting struck in the head with a ball moving at the speed of an airplane. And so she had worried that this hike would drive her mad with boredom. And now it is boring; here in Tanzania, she is bored. She will die of a crushing monotony before she even has a chance at a high-altitude cerebral edema.
After ten minutes, the group has traveled about two hundred yards, and it is time to stop. Mike is complaining of shoulder pain. His pack’s straps need to be adjusted. Frank stops to help Mike, and while Frank is doing that, and Jerry and Shelly are waiting with Patrick, Grant continues up the trail. He does not stop. He goes around a bend in the path and he is out of view. The rain and the jungle make possible quick disappearances and before she knows why, Rita follows him.
She catches up to Grant and soon they are up two turns and can no longer see the group. Rita is elated. Grant walks quickly and she walks with him. They are almost running. They are moving at a pace she finds more fitting, an athletic pace, a pace appropriate for people who are not yet old. Rita is not yet old. She quit that 10k Fun Run last year but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been so boring. She had started biking to work but then had decided against it; at the end of the day, when she’d done as much as she could before 5:30, she was just too tired.