Ken. Only doing my job.”
“YOU SLIP THE poles through the sleeves, then fit the ends into the bottom pockets and the thing pops right up, like this.”
In the tukul’s dim interior, Phyllis demonstrated the technique, Quinette mortified that she, a country girl, couldn’t figure out how to erect her tent. Phyllis had hers up in half a minute and went outside. Quinette assembled the sections of the poles and felt a sense of accomplishment when the shapeless folds of mesh and cloth ballooned into a dome, just big enough to accommodate one person. Like Phyllis’s, hers wasn’t exactly a tent but a mosquito net with a sewn-in ground sheet. Side by side the two shelters resembled giant soap bubbles, risen out of the hard-packed dirt floor. She dragged her sleeping bag and air mattress into the bubble. Probably she wouldn’t need the sleeping bag—the air inside the windowless tukul, smelling like damp hay too long in the barn, was stagnant and hot. She lay down for a moment and, looking up through the mesh, searched for snakes and spiders in the thatch ceiling. Her head began to swim again; she felt herself teetering on the brink of sleep, the desire to fall into it checked by the grumbling in her stomach. She rummaged in her pack for a PowerBar and a bag of trail mix and went out with the food and her water bottle. Phyllis was sitting on a camp stool, her back bent as she gazed into a hand mirror propped against a rock at her feet and rubbed her face with cleansing cream.
“Thinking of entering a beauty contest?” Quinette said, peeling the wrapper off the half-melted PowerBar.
“In my business, every goddamned day is a beauty contest.” Phyllis’s eyes peered through a white mask. “Got to keep the crone at bay. A lot of cute patooties about your age would love to have my job. Think they want it, anyway. One day like today, walking ten miles in hundred-degree heat, sleeping in some native shithole, and those darlings would be whining to be sent back to the air-conditioned studio.”
She was speaking again in her natural voice, stone grinding on stone. Quinette held out the bag of trail mix.
“Thanks. I’ll be dining on my own delicious stuff in a minute.”
Phyllis pointed at a can under the camp stool. Quinette was dismayed to see that it was a can of beans.
“Like some tea with your gourmet granola?”
“Sure. Okay.”
The reporter set the jar of cream aside and looked toward the soldiers, squatting in a circle around the steaming pot on the campfire. Holding two fingers in a V she called out, “Tungependa mbili chai, tafahadli.”
The soldiers turned toward her with blank faces. Matthew was with them.
“Forgot, these characters don’t know Swahili,” Phyllis muttered, then called out again, “Ideenee etnayan shi, minfadlik. And if you don’t understand Arabic either, I’d like two cups of tea, pah-leese.”
“This is not safari, you know, and we are not camp boys,” Matthew said, the smile on his lips absent from his voice.
“But you are gentlemen, aren’t you?” Phyllis shot back. “And I did say ‘please,’ in three languages.”
Quinette asked, “So what is your job that all those cuties want it?”
Phyllis looked at her askance. “Hello? Where have you been all day? I’m a foreign correspondent for CNN, Nairobi bureau chief.”
“ ‘Only doing my job,’ you said to Ken. That’s what I meant. I didn’t think you were being fair, digging at him like that. So is that your job?”
“If you saw me when I’m in a mood to be unfair, then you’d know I was being anything but.” Phyllis contemplated herself in the mirror, turning her head one side to the other. With a tissue she carefully wiped off the excess cream from her forehead, her nose, the arrowhead of her chin. “Varnish removal, that’s my job,” she said, facing Quinette. “People put a high gloss on things, layers of it. I rub it off, get down to the bare wood, because nothing is ever what it appears to be, and nobody is what they make themselves out to be.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying you think Ken . . .”
“Nah. Your Ken . . .”
“He’s not mine,” Quinette interrupted. “What did you suppose, that I’m fucking him?”
Phyllis drew back, in a burlesque of shock. “Doesn’t sound like language from a good Christian girl.”
“I wasn’t always.”
“Bad girl gone good? Listen, don’t be so damned defensive. That’s the last thing I’d think, you and him in the