Koji guided the sugar train down the mountain, wiping sweat and coal dust from his face with his bandana. It was stifling in the cramped engine car, even after Pedro, his fireman, stopped shoveling coal into the fire. He began coughing again, and looked up at Mauna Loa, still shrouded in a massive gray plume of steam and gas and ash that rose into the sky and drifted toward Kona. Yesterday’s sun had been muted, the sky darkened by fog and a dusting of volcanic ash that cast everything into shadows, the dull, gray air hard to breathe. Today Koji was relieved that the trade winds had returned as the train traveled toward Hilo and the station. As long as the lava flowed away from the sugar plantations and Hilo, the sugar train continued its twice-daily runs, despite all-powerful and unforgiving Pele.

The Hawaii Consolidated Railway ran three different train lines through Hilo, the main thread connecting all the mill towns from Mahukima to Kohala to Niulii. One line transported passengers from along the Hamakua coast. Another carried freight and goods to the warehouse down by Hilo Bay. The third line ran the narrow-gauge sugar trains. From March through November the sugar trains worked nonstop, either transporting sugar from the northern Hamakua coast mills to the port, or, like Koji’s train, traveling up and down the mountain carrying sacks of refined sugar from the Puli Plantation mill down to Waiakea, the deepwater port at Hilo Bay to be stored at the wharf warehouse, or loaded directly onto an awaiting steamship heading to the mainland. Every time Koji climbed up to the engine car, he was reminded of when he and Razor were teenagers at the end of the harvest season, catching rides up and down to Hilo on the sugar train. He’d learned everything he could from the engineer, Salvador, never dreaming that so many years later he would be the one running the train. When the train left Puli and rounded the cane fields, Koji thought he glimpsed Razor, only to look again and see it wasn’t him.

Koji leaned out the engine window as the train slowed on its approach toward Hilo’s clapboard train station, with its simple ticket office and waiting room with wooden benches. He pulled the slippery cord to sound the whistle. Steam hissed as a plume reached toward the sky. He saw Daniel standing on the platform in the same spot where he’d waited for Koji when he was a boy. As the train rolled to a stop, Koji leaned farther out the window and raised his hand.

Just like old times.

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