Grant’s hands are clasped in front of him, extending awkwardly, as if arm-wrestling with himself. He is listening and looking at Frank without any sort of emotion.
“That thing ain’t dry tonight, you’re gonna be bunking with me or someone else, my friend.” Frank is scratching his beard in a way that looks painful. “Otherwise the rain and wind will make an icebox of that tent. You’ll freeze in your sleep, and you won’t even know it. You’ll wake up dead.”
The trail winds like a narrow river up through an hour of rainforest, drier today, and then cuts through a hillside cleared by fire. Everyone is walking together now, the ground bare and black. There are twisted remnants of trees straining from the soil, their extremities gone but their roots almost intact.
“There’s your forest fire,” Frank says.
The fog is finally clearing. Though the pace is slow, around a field of round rocks knee-high, it is not as slow as the day before, and because Rita is tired and her legs are sore in every place, from ankle to upper thigh, she accepts the reduced speed. Grant is behind her and also seems resigned.
But Mike is far more ill today. The five paying hikers know this because it has become the habit of all to monitor the health of everyone else. The question “How are you?” on this mountain is not rhetorical. The words in each case, from each hiker, give way to a distinct and complicated answer, involving the appearance or avoidance of blisters, of burgeoning headaches, of sore ankles and quads, shoulders that still, even with the straps adjusted, feel pinched. Mike’s stomach feels, he is telling everyone, like there is actually a large tapeworm inside him. Its movements are trackable, relentless, he claims, and he’s given it a name: Ashley, after an ex-girlfriend. He looks desperate for a moment of contentment; he looks like a sick child, lying on the bathroom floor, bent around the toilet, exhausted and defeated, who’s forgotten what it was to feel strong.
Today the porters are passing the paying hikers. Every few minutes another goes by, or a group of them. The porters walk alone or in packs of three. When they come through they do one of two things: if there is room around the hikers, when the path is wide or there is space to walk through the dirt or rocks beside them, they will jog around them; when the path is narrow, they will wait for the hikers to step aside.
Rita and Grant are stepping aside.
“Jambo,” Grant says.
“Jambo,” the first porter says.
“Habari,” Grant says.
“Imara,” the porter says.
And he and the two others walk past. Rita asks Grant what he’s just said. Habari, Grant explains, means How are you, and imara means strong. She watches them pass, noticing the last of the three. He is about twenty, wearing a CBS News T-shirt, khaki pants, and cream-colored Timberland hiking shoes, almost new. He is carrying two duffel bags on his head. One of them is Rita’s. She almost tells the man this — Hey, that’s my duffel you’re carrying, ha ha! — this but then catches herself. There’s nothing she can say in English she’d be proud of.
“Blue!” Jerry yells, pointing to a small spot of sky that the fog has left uncovered. It’s the first swatch of blue the sky has allowed since the trip began, and it elicits an unnatural spasm of joy in Rita. She wants to climb through the gap and spread herself out above the cloudline, as you would a ladder leading to a treefort. Soon the blue hole grows and the sun, still obscured but now directly above, gives heat through a thin layer of cloudcover. The air around them warms almost immediately and Rita, along with the other paying hikers, stops to remove layers and put on sunglasses. Frank takes a pair of wet pants from his bag and ties them to a carabiner; they hang to his heels, filthy.
Mike now has the perpetual look of someone disarming a bomb. His forehead is never without sweat beaded along the ridges of the three distinct lines on his forehead. He is sucking on a silver tube, like a ketchup container but larger.
“Energy food,” he explains.
They are all eating the snacks they’ve brought. Every day Steven gives the paying hikers a sack lunch of eggs and crackers, which no one eats. Rita is inhaling peanuts and raisins and chocolate. Jerry is gnawing on his beef jerky. They are all sharing food and needed articles of clothing and medical aid. Shelly loans Mike her Ace bandage, to wrap around his ankle, which he thinks is swollen. Jerry loans Rita a pair of Thinsulate gloves.
Fifteen porters pass while the paying hikers are eating and changing. One porter, more muscular than the others, who are uniformly thin, is carrying a radio playing American country music. The porter is affecting a nonchalant pride in this music, a certain casual ownership of it. To each porter Grant says jambo and most say jambo in return, eliciting more greetings from Jerry — who now likes to say the word, loudly.
“Jahm-BO!” he roars, in a way that seems intended to frighten.
Shelly steps over to Frank.
“What do the porters eat?” she asks.
“Eat? The porters? Well, they eat what you eat, pretty much,” Frank says, then reaches for Shelly’s hips and pats one. “Maybe without the snacking,” he says, and winks.
There is a boom like a jet plane backfiring. Or artillery fire. Everyone looks up, then down the mountain. No one knows where to look. The porters, farther up the trail but still within view, stop briefly. Rita sees one mime the shooting of a rifle. Then they continue.
Now Rita is walking alone. She has talked to most of the paying hikers and feels caught up. She knows about Shelly’s marriages, her unfinished Ph.D. in philosophy, her son living in a group home in Indiana after going off his medication and using a pizza cutter to threaten the life of a coworker. She knows Jerry, knows that Jerry feels his restaurants bring their communities together, knows that he fashioned them after Greek meeting places more than any contemporary dining model — he wants great ideas to be born over his food — and when he was expanding on the subject, gesturing with a stick he carried for three hours, she feared he would use the word peripatetic, and soon enough he did. She knew she would wince and she did. And she knows that Mike is unwell and is getting sicker and has begun to make jokes about how funny it would be for a designer of ambulances to lie dying on a mountain without any real way of getting to one.
The terrain is varied and Rita is happy; the route seems as if planned by hikers with short attention spans. There has been rainforest, then savannah, then more forest, then forest charred, and now the path cuts through a rocky hillside covered in ice-green groundcover, an ocean floor drained, the boulders everywhere huge and dripping with lichen of a seemingly synthetic orange.
The porters are passing her regularly now, not just the porters from her group but about a hundred more, from the Canadian camp, the German camp, other camps. She passes a tiny Japanese woman sitting on a round rock, flanked by a guide and a porter, waiting.
The porters are laboring more now. On the first day, they seemed almost cavalier, and walked so quickly that now she is surprised to see them straining, plodding and unamused. A small porter, older, approaches her back and she stops to allow him through.
“Jambo,” she says.
“Jambo,” he says.
He is carrying a large duffel with Jerry’s name on it, atop his head, held there with the bag’s thick strap, with cuts across his forehead. Below the strap, perspiration flows down the bridge of his nose.
“Habari?” she says.
“Imara,” he says.
“Water?” she asks. He stops.
She removes her bottle from her backpack holster and holds it out to him. He stops and takes it, smiling. He takes a long drink from the wide mouth of the clear plastic container, and then continues walking.