The Noon Conductor

If Pineapple Express is your strain, this is your sign: the Noon Conductor. A narrow-gauge train climbing the plantation hills of an island at noon, steam going off on the trade wind, and you in the carriage doorway with one hand on the rail, smiling at the next stop as if it were good news.

The third switchback, noon. Puffs of steam on the trade wind, the noon train climbing one straight leg through the rows, and the shower still ten minutes off. Five-second loop.

If Pineapple Express is your strain

You run the noon train. Not the early one and not the late one: the one that pulls out when the sun is straight overhead and the shadows have crawled under the carriages to wait. You like the hour when nothing on the island can pretend to be anything else. Everything is lit, everyone is out, and that is your kind of crowd.

You know the secret of a steep hill, which is that nobody climbs it straight. You go forward until the track runs out, you throw the switch, and you back up the next leg a little farther up the hill. People riding with you for the first time think the train is lost. It is not lost. It is on the second switchback, exactly where you meant it to be.

At your best you are the reason a carriage of strangers is laughing by the halfway tank. You know every regular’s stop and most of their news, you punch every ticket with the same small flourish, and the little paper suns your punch cuts out go off through the open side on the wind. You call each stop as if it were good news. To you, it is.

Your flaw is the wave. Somebody lifts a hand at the edge of a field where there is no platform and no stop, and you pull the cord anyway, every single time. The noon train has never once arrived at noon. You have decided that the timetable is a suggestion and the people waving are the point, and the people who love you have stopped arguing.

What you need is a steep hill, a strong sun, a shower you can set the day by, and somebody on the platform at the top who is glad to see you. Give you that, and everybody gets there: late, and laughing.

Your hour: Noon, when the shadows hide under the carriages
Your place: The third switchback
Your object: A brass ticket punch that cuts a small sun
Your tempo: Forward, back, up
Your weather: The ten-minute shower just after noon
Your flaw: You stop for every wave

Your people

The Sprinter (Green Crack)The Sprinter has finished her race before your engine has its steam up. She calls your train the slowest thing on any island; you tell her she has never once stopped for the view.
The Night Courier (Sour Diesel)The Night Courier has never been late in his life, and you have never once been on time. You respect each other enormously, from opposite ends of the day.
The Mountain Elder (Hindu Kush)The Mountain Elder knows what you know: the way up a steep hill is sideways, and nobody needs to hurry it.

Things you say

Back is part of up.
Somebody waved. That’s a stop.
Ten minutes. The hill will rain and the switch will give.
Every ticket gets its sun.
Slow is how you stay on the rails.

A scene from your world

Ten past noon

The Noon Conductor swings up onto the last carriage as the engine gives its first long sigh of steam at the Landing. The chalkboard by the water tank says Noon, which is the whole timetable, and the sun agrees: it is straight overhead, and the shadows of the two cream carriages have crawled underneath them to wait it out. She works down the benches with the brass punch. Click, and a ticket gets its small sun. Click. Click. The punched-out suns go out of the open side of the carriage and away on the trade wind, east, over the harbor.

The line pulls away from the harbor and starts up between the fields, rows of spiky gold-crowned plants combed straight up the slope. Halfway along the second field a man lifts a hand. There is no platform there and no stop on any timetable, and she pulls the cord anyway. He hands up a crate of the season’s first ripe fruit and climbs aboard after it, and when he has no ticket, she punches the label on the crate.

Then the switchbacks. The hill is too steep to take straight, so the line takes it in a zigzag: forward until the track runs out against the hillside, a stop, a thrown switch, then backward up the next leg, so that the back of the train becomes the front. At each one she drops off the step, leans on the long brass lever until the rails slide across, and walks the length of the train to the new front, calling the next stop as if it were good news. First switchback. Second. The passengers new to the line look worried. The regulars wave at the worried ones.

At the third switchback the lever will not move. She leans on it, then leans harder. The rails have swollen in the noon heat and the switch is held fast, iron against iron, and the engine sighs behind her with nowhere to go. A woman in the front carriage asks how long. The Conductor looks up at the summit, where one white cloud has sat since morning, going grey underneath. “Ten minutes,” she says, and goes back down the benches to punch everybody’s ticket a second time, for the view.

At ten past noon the cloud lets go, the way it does every day. It rains warm and straight down for exactly as long as it takes to say so, and the hot rails hiss and send up small clouds of their own. Then the sun is back. She sets her hand on the lever, and it slides across as easily as a door.

The train backs up the last leg into the light, and the whole island opens out below: the harbor, the fields, the zigzag they have just climbed, the shower moving off across the sea. In a few days a far coast will get that rain and wonder where it came from. The Conductor knows. She leans out from the step and lets the last handful of little paper suns go after it.

The hill line

The Landing: Where the line begins, beside the harbor: a water tank, a bench in the shade and a chalkboard timetable that says Noon. That is the whole timetable.
The fields: Rows of spiky, gold-crowned plants combed straight up the hill on both sides of the line. There is a hand somewhere in every field, and any hand might wave.
The three switchbacks: Where the hill gets too steep to take straight, and the line goes forward, stops and backs up the next leg, three times over. New passengers think the train is lost. It is climbing.
The long lever: Brass, at the top of each switchback, worn bright where one hand goes. In the noon heat the third one sticks. Nobody forces it.
The cloud on the summit: It sits on top of the hill all morning and rains for ten minutes just after noon, warm and straight down, for as long as anyone on the line can remember.
The little suns: What the ticket punch cuts out: paper suns no bigger than a fingernail, which go out of the open carriages on the trade wind, east over the sea, toward the far coast where the rain ends up.