“You like zebras?” she asks. She rolls her eyes at her own inability to sound like anything but a moron.
He smiles and nods. She touches his sweatshirt and gives him a thumbs up. He smiles nervously.
She dips her hands into the water. Exactly the temperature she expected — cold but not bracing. She uses her fingernails to scrape the dirt from her palms, and with each trowel-like movement, she seems to free soil from her hand’s lines. She then lets the water run over her palm, and her sense of accomplishment is great. Without soap she will clean these filthy hands! But when she is finished, when she has dried her hands on her shorts, they look exactly the same, filthy.
The sun has come through while she was staring at them, and she turns to face the sun, which is low but strong. The sun convinces her that she belongs here more than the other hikers, more than the porters. She is still not wearing socks! And now the sun is warming her, telling her not to worry that she cannot get her hands clean.
“Sun,” she says to the porter, and smiles.
He nods while twisting the cap on the second container.
“What is your name?” she asks.
“Kassim,” he says.
She asks him to spell it. He does. She tries to say it and he smiles.
“You think we’re crazy to pay to hike up this hill?” she asks. She is nodding, hoping he will agree with her. He smiles and shakes his head, not understanding.
“Crazy?” Rita says, pointing to her chest. “To pay to hike up this hill?” She is walking her index and middle fingers up an imaginary mountain in the air. She points to the peak of Kilimanjaro, ringed by clouds, curved blades guarding the final thousand feet.
He doesn’t understand, or pretends not to. Rita decides that Kassim is her favorite porter and that she’ll give him her lunch. When they reach the bottom, she’ll give him her boots. She glances at his feet, inside ancient faux-leather basketball shoes, and knows that his feet are much too big. Maybe he has kids. He can give the shoes to the kids. It occurs to Rita then that he’s at work. That his family is at home while he is on the mountain. This is what she misses so much, coming home to those kids. The noise! They would just start in, a million things they had to talk about. She was interrupted all night until they fell asleep. They had no respect for her privacy and she loved them for their insouciance. She wants to sign more field trip permission slips. She wants to quietly curse their gym teacher for upsetting them. She wants to clean the gum out of J.J.’s backpack or wash Frederick’s urine-soaked sheets.
Kassim finishes, his vessels full, and so he stands, waves goodbye, and jogs back to the camp.
In the sun the hikers and porters lay their wet clothes out on the rocks, hang them from the bare limbs of the trees. The temperature rises from freezing to sixty in an hour and everyone is delirious with warmth, with the idea of being dry, of everything being dry. The campsite, now visible for hundreds of yards, is wretched with people — maybe four hundred of them — and the things they’re bringing up the mountain. There are colors ragged everywhere, dripping from the trees, bleeding into the earth. In every direction hikers are walking, toilet paper in hand, to find a private spot to deposit their waste.
Rita devours her porridge and she knows that she is feeling strong just as a few of the others are fading. They are cramped around the card table, in the tent, and the flaps are open for the first time during a meal, and it is now too warm, too sunny. Those facing the sun are wearing sunglasses.
“Lordy that feels good,” Grant says.
“Thank God,” Jerry says.
“You sure, dear Lord, we deserve this? Sure we haven’t suffered enough?” Shelly says, and they laugh.
“I don’t want to spoil the mood,” Frank says, “but I have an announcement. I wanted to make clear that you’re not allowed to give porters stuff. This morning, Mike thought it was a good idea to give a porter his sunglasses, and what happened, Mike?”
“Some other guy was wearing them.”
“How long did it take before the sunglasses were on this other guy?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Why’s that, Mike?”
“Because you’re supposed to give stuff to Patrick first.”
“Right. Listen, people. There’s a pecking order here, and Patrick knows the score. If you have a wave of generosity come over you and wanna give someone your lunch or your shoelaces or something, you give it to Patrick. He’ll distribute whatever it is. That’s the only way it’s fair. That understood? You’re here to walk and they’re here to work.”
Everyone nods.
“Why you giving your sunglasses away anyway, Mike? You’re sure as hell gonna need ’em these next couple days. You get to the top and you’re—”
“I’m going down,” Mike says.
“What?”
“I have to go down,” Mike says, staring at Frank, the sun lightening his blue eyes until they’re sweater-gray, almost colorless. “I don’t have the desire any more.”
“The desire, eh?”
Frank pauses for a second, and seems to move, silently, from wanting to joke with Mike to wanting to talk him out of it to accepting the decision. It’s clear he wants Jerry to say something, but Jerry is silent. Jerry will speak to Mike in private.
“Well,” Frank says, “you know it when you know it, I guess. Patrick’ll get a porter to walk you down.”
Mike and Frank talk about how it will work. All the way down in one day? That’s best, Frank says. That way you won’t need provisions. Who brings my stuff? You carry your pack, a porter will carry the duffel. Get in by nightfall, probably, and Godwill will be there to meet you. Who’s Godwill? The driver. Oh, the older man. Yes. Godwill. He’ll come up to get you. If the park rangers think it’s an emergency, they’ll let him drive about half the way up. So how much of a hike will we make down? Six hours. I think I can do that. You can, Mike, you can. You’ll have to. No problem. Thanks for playing. Better luck next time.
Jerry still hasn’t said anything. He is eating his porridge quickly, listening. He is now chewing his porridge, his face pinched, his eyes planning.
After breakfast Rita is walking to the toilet tent and passes the cooking tent. There are six porters inside, and a small tight group outside — younger porters, mostly, each holding a small cup, standing around a large plastic tub, like those used to bus dishes and silverware. Kassim is there; she recognizes him immediately because he, like all of the porters, wears the same clothes each day. There is another sweatshirt she knows, with a white torso and orange sleeves, a florid Hello Kitty logo on the chest. Rita tries to catch Kassim’s eye but he’s concentrating on the cooking tent. Steven steps through the flaps with a silver bowl and overturns it into the tub. The young porters descend upon it, stabbing their cups into the small mound of porridge until it’s gone in seconds.
The trail makes its way gradually upward and winds around the mountain, and Mike, groaning with every leaden step, is still with them. Rita doesn’t know why he is still with the group. He is lagging behind, with Patrick, and looks stripped of all blood and hope. He is pale, and he is listing to one side, and is using hiking poles as an elderly man would use a cane, unsure and relying too heavily on that point at the end of a stick.
The clouds are following the group up the mountain. They should stay ahead of the clouds, Frank told them, if they want to keep warm today. There has been talk of more rain, but Frank and Patrick believe that it won’t rain at the next camp — it’s too high. They are hiking in a high desert area called the Saddle, between the peaks of Mawenzi, a mile away and jagged, and Kibo, above. The vegetation is now sparse, the trees long gone. Directly above the trail stands the mountain, though the peak is still obscured by cloud cover. She and Grant are still the only ones who have seen it, at midnight under the bright small moon.