Ndong.

His mother's house sits deep in the forest, off the road that climbs into the Crystal Mountains, and it has three rooms. In the dry season, eleven people sleep there. Mengue does the assigning: who gets the back room, who gets the mat in the hallway, who makes do on the bench outside because they arrived last and arrived late. Nobody argues with the assignment.

The whole community numbers more than six hundred people. It's a figure that, when he mentions it in Owendo, people don't quite believe, so he stopped mentioning it years ago. He knows almost every name. He doesn't know every face — that's different — but he knows the names, because they run through houses, and the houses run through mothers.

He counts people without meaning to. Those who climb aboard at every stop, those still in the carriage at three in the morning, those in the big house the first night he arrives. He started at nine, counting heads because his mother told him to, and he lost count at sixty, three times running, before he fell asleep. Now he gets it right almost every time, and he tells no one.

In the community, nobody talks about being in danger. They say the houses up north are emptier than before, that you have to climb farther to find the same thing, and they say it in the same tone they'd use to talk about the weather. The first night of every dry season, there's one extra plate on the table, blue enamel, its rim chipped. He puts it there without a word, and nobody mentions it.

His father never lived in the house. Nzé still lives half a day's walk away, in a one-room place he built himself, and he'd turn up in the dry season, stay a few weeks, and leave again. That's how young Ndong counted the years in his head: one, the year of the new house; two, the year the river dropped so low you could cross it on foot.

Nobody ever told him it was strange to count that way. Among his people, adult men don't form a household; the house belongs to the mother's line, and the men come and go. By your twenties you no longer sleep there more than a few weeks a year. It's not called abandonment, and it's not called freedom either. It's called being outside.

With his father he talks about tools. One morning every dry season they go together for handle wood, six hours there and back and maybe thirty sentences between the two of them, and both come home content. Neither has ever mentioned that they live exactly the same life.

He came down to Owendo with a cousin, to an aunt's house, to finish school. Fourteen years old. In the community the boys leave early and nobody stands at the door to see them off, so he left on a Tuesday, and by the following Tuesday it was already just a thing that had happened.

His aunt had a two-room house in Nkembo and four kids, and he slept in the living room with a folded blanket for a mattress. He learned to get around Libreville in two weeks: which shared taxi to take and when, what time the market fills up, how hard you have to haggle over a price without offending the other person. It came easy to him. What didn't come easy was the noise of sleeping in a house with only six people in it.

He went two years without going back because the ticket cost what it cost, and he didn't have it. His mother never held it against him. He did, and he's never talked about it with anyone.

He made the whole trip for the first time at fifteen, from Owendo to Franceville, sitting on the floor of the bus aisle with his legs pulled up and a bag for a pillow. Nineteen hours. He spent half the night watching the cabin door, which opened now and then and let out a greenish light from the gauges and a smell of hot diesel that still strikes him as a good smell to this day. When they reached Franceville his back was wrecked and he had a fairly clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life.

He joined the railway at nineteen, but not in a cab: on the track maintenance crew for the stretch between Ntoum and Andem, twenty-two kilometers covered on foot with a bar over the shoulder. He learned the kilometers by walking them. To this day, when he passes the level crossing at kilometer marker forty-one, he knows the ballast on the left sinks with the rains, and he slows down a little early without thinking about it.

He got his driver's certification at twenty-three. The engineer who trained him, a man of few words with thirty years on the line, gave him an orange wool cap the day the papers came through and told him not to lose it. He never explained why, and Ndong never asked.

He puts it on before he touches anything. He takes it off when he gets down. It's been frayed at the edge for years, and no one outside a cab has ever seen him wear it — not his sister, not his mother, not the people at the Owendo market, who see him every week buying rice.

At twenty-six they moved him to the express. Fewer stops, better schedule, higher pay. The office handed it to him like a prize, and in the community, when he went up to tell them, his mother brought out the good plate.

He left Owendo, reached Franceville at night, slept in the company residence, and came back. A room with air conditioning and a television on in the dining hall. Three years like that.

In those three years he didn't learn a single name. He says it without drama, like a service fact, the same way he'd say there are twenty curves on that stretch. People got on at the big stations, sat far from the cab, got off at the big stations. Nobody came up with a bundle to ask if there was room. Nobody showed him a lamp from the edge of the track at four in the morning.

They were the years that paid him best, and the ones he remembers worst. He kept the paperwork from that appointment, and he couldn't say why.

A landslide in the rainy season cut the line past kilometer two hundred, and the train sat stopped in the forest until dawn. Two hundred-odd people. Within half an hour there were already people down on the ballast, and within an hour there were three fires going and someone had brought out a radio.

Ndong got down from the cab, stood at the edge of the embankment, and stayed there all night. Someone brought him a cup of coffee without his asking. Someone asked him the time and he answered with the time. Beyond that he didn't speak, and he didn't need to.

When they cleared the line at six in the morning and people started climbing back on, he was slow to move. He blamed the cold, which in the dry season, at that hour, with the river's damp in the air, really does get into you. He was the last one up, put his cap on, and didn't say a word until Booué.

The following month he asked for the transfer to the local.

At the office they asked him if he was sure. It's the bottom shift: more hours, more stops, passengers with bundles, a train that takes nineteen hours to do what the other one does in thirteen. He said the overtime worked out better, and since the number added up, nobody checked it. He's been saying it for two years.

Now departure is early afternoon. Before he touches anything, he puts on the cap, brushes his chest against the doorframe as he climbs up — he says he's checking that the door shuts properly — and goes through the names of the stops in order, quietly, to himself: Ntoum, Andem, M'Bel, Oyan, Abanga. If he gets one wrong, he starts over from Ntoum.

Behind the seat he keeps the errands lined up in order of where they get off. Medicine, a car battery, three kilos of rice, a phone charger, a package a woman gave him on the Owendo platform for someone in Booué he doesn't know at all. A liter thermos he doesn't share, and two cups on top of the box in case the train chief comes aboard.

On the days he doesn't run, he sleeps in a rented room behind the Owendo market: one room, a hot plate, a chair, and a fan he doesn't switch off even in the dry season. Eight years, and he hasn't hung a thing on the walls. His younger brother, Bekale, went down to Libreville to look for work and is still looking, and he turns up there without notice and leaves the same way; he's had his own set of keys since the first month. Ndong has never asked him how long he's staying. He knows exactly what it's like to turn up in someone else's home, and he has no intention of saying so.

Between Abanga and Ndjolé there are places with no platform, no sign, no name on the timetable. People stand at the edge of the track with a kerosene lamp or a phone flashlight, and he stops. It's not on the service log, and nobody has ever forbidden it in writing. He waits while they load their bundles, counts who gets on, and pulls away.

It's the phrase people know him by all along the line, and he says it like he's giving an instruction: show me the light, and I'll stop.

The best part of the shift comes around two in the morning, when the carriage goes completely quiet. No more talking, nobody standing, just the noise of the rails and a hundred-odd people asleep on the other side of the wall. He's not alone, and he doesn't have to talk to anyone. His sister Ntsame, the only one who's said it to his face, maintains he didn't ask for the local because of the hours.

On the right-hand doorframe of the cab there's a small round mirror, the pocket-mirror kind, stuck on with electrical tape and turned inward. It's been there four years. If anyone asks, he says it's to see the platform, though the platform is easier to see through the window, and everyone knows it.

Since he went back to the local, the red in his face has been fading. The blue of his ridges is exactly the same. He blames the light in that cab, which is bad; the diesel; sleeping in the daytime; the gray of the dry season, which in Gabon keeps the sky covered from June to September and has everyone pulling out their jackets. He's the only one on the line who wears a cap year-round.

In the dry season he goes up to the forest. He sleeps in the big house, counts heads on the first night, goes for wood with his father, and comes back to Owendo with his face glowing, and says it's the sun off the river.

His mother never asks him to come back. She counts the days out loud in front of him — the fourteenth was a month ago — and falls silent. He answers with the date of his next day off. Both things are understood as said.