DON’T ASK ME. YOU’RE THE CONDUCTOR
Kate thought of saying, Well, you’re the train! or How am I supposed to know? or maybe But Tom’s a conductor, too! But she didn’t. She couldn’t, really. She hadn’t asked to be the conductor of a magic steam train, or not exactly, but deep down she knew she kind of had. She’d wanted something real, something that wasn’t kid stuff. Something that mattered. And looky here, this was it.
And Uncle Herbert had told her to get off the train, right at the start, and she hadn’t. If she wasn’t sure what to do, she would just have to guess based on what she did know and live with the consequences.
Probably that was an important life lesson she was supposed to be learning from this whole experience. Which was fine, she guessed, though she hoped there weren’t too many more of them.
“Okay, let’s stop,” she said. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”
12
Kate Finds Out What’s Going On
SO THEY THROTTLED THE SILVER ARROW DOWN, AND fiddled with the reversing lever, and applied the brakes, and Kate took her ticket-puncher and straightened her conductor’s hat and went back to the passenger cars.
They were chugging through a pine forest now, and the air smelled pleasantly like their garage had after the time Kate spilled turpentine there. They pulled up at a plain cement platform, and Kate threw the big brass lever that opened the doors.
Something was different. Usually there was a sign on the platform saying where they were, but this time Kate couldn’t see one anywhere.
Six or seven gray squirrels, a huge gray pig, and a couple of brown snakes waited on the platform. On the ground and the branches overhead sat a whole flock of black birds with a slight iridescent rainbow shine to their wings that reminded Kate of an oil slick.
She recognized the birds. They were sparrows—or no, not sparrows, starlings! That’s what they were. None of the creatures moved. They just sat there staring at her.
Then she realized that something else was different, too. None of them were holding tickets.
“So… hi,” Kate said.
The giant pig trotted forward and stood right in front of her. He really was unbelievably big, as tall as she was, and he looked much more fit somehow than your average pig. In fact, he seemed to be completely made out of muscle.
That’s not a pig at all, Kate thought. That must be a wild boar. She’d never seen one in real life. He had tiny eyes and a wet nose and huge upward-thrusting yellow tusks.
Kate cleared her throat. “Tickets, please.”
The boar just stood there in front of her. She tried again.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t ride the train without a ticket.”
“I don’t have a ticket,” the boar said in a deep voice.
“Well,” Kate said slowly, “I guess you can’t ride the train, then.”
“Then I guess we have a problem.”
Kate frowned. She wasn’t immediately warming to this boar.
“I am sorry to have to say this,” she said, “but it more seems like you have a problem.”
“You don’t sound very sorry,” chittered a squirrel.
So that’s how it’s going to be, Kate thought. She folded her arms with more firmness than she really felt.
“I really am sorry, but I don’t make the rules. If it’s that important, why don’t you just go and get tickets and come back? I’m sure we’ll be back here soon.”
That was a fib—she wasn’t sure at all—but she really wanted to bring this conversation to an end. She stepped back into the train and closed the doors.
But the doors didn’t close, because the boar stuck his huge head right in between them. He had large, furry ears and not the slightest trace of a neck.
“I don’t want a ticket,” he said. “I want to get on this train. Now be a good girl and open the door.”
They stared at each other. He didn’t seem to be even the slightest bit bothered by having the doors closed on his head. Kate thought about it: Really, who would it hurt if she let them on? It’s not like she needed their money. (If animals even had money. She wondered again how exactly they got their tickets.) Plus this boar weighed about five times what she did and could probably kill her in about ten seconds, even taking into account the awesome kicking power of her new steel-capped boots.
One of the brown snakes pushed forward between the boar’s hooves.
“Look, I can see you’re in a tough position.” The snake’s voice was calm and reasonable and almost sympathetic. “You’re on a tight schedule. You have to get this train moving. But thing is, we’ve got all day, and we’re not going to let this train go till you let us on. You can’t win, so why not just let it slide and we’ll all be on our way?”
“Trust us,” a squirrel said, “you don’t want to make an issue out of this.”
It would’ve been so easy to give in—giving in was almost always the easiest thing, in Kate’s experience. The only problem was—what was the problem? It felt wrong. This was her train. Uncle Herbert had given it to her, and it was the first thing ever that was well and truly her responsibility. It came with rules, and the rule was that you had to have a ticket. Maybe it was a stupid rule, but that was up to her, not these animals. It was time to decide whether she was going to let herself be bullied.
And when she realized that, she realized that she’d already decided.
“But I don’t trust you. Not in the slightest.” She wished her voice weren’t shaking, but it was. “And I’m not making an issue out of this, it’s already an issue. Get off my train, please. Right now.”
Kate pointed in the direction of “off the train,” in case that made it clearer. She stared into the boar’s tiny orange eyes. She wished Tom were there.
The boar didn’t move. Instead he snorted at her:
“RONK!”
The sound was deafening—like an explosion. She jumped three feet backward out of sheer terror.
“RONK RONK RONK RONK RONK!”
Kate had gotten so used to animals talking politely that she’d almost forgotten they were wild creatures. They weren’t tame. They weren’t safe. The boar strained at the doors to get at her. He tossed his head viciously, with those tusks, and Kate cowered back even farther. She’d thought she wanted this—she’d thought she wanted an adventure—but she hadn’t thought at all about how scary it would be! She hadn’t thought about the fact that when you were in it, you didn’t know how it would end! For all you knew you could end up gored and trampled by an angry boar far from home and never see your parents again—
“What on earth do you think you’re doing? Get your fat head out of those doors!”
The voice came from behind Kate.
Kate didn’t dare take her eyes off the boar. But as she watched, an incredible thing happened to him. The boar’s little eyes went as wide as they could go, and his huge, snorting face showed an expression Kate hadn’t thought it was capable of.
It was fear. Kate risked a glance behind her. The voice belonged to the porcupine.