Rohan Quine, “Apricot Eyes”, 3 The stalking on the subway train

[…] Dusty grey pipes, cables, pillars and occasional dim caverns streak by me.

Then the train emerges above ground and onto elevated tracks. The stations, mostly empty, give little clue to the gangland below. One-Hundred-Thirty-Eighth Street, Brook Avenue, Cypress Avenue, East One-Hundred-Forty-Third Street, East One-Hundred-Forty-Ninth Street, and now Longwood Avenue. I check a map above the windows. It’ll be three more stops before we reach any place where a self-respecting televangelist would live—but no, for there in the next carriage Kev is getting up and leaving the train.

With great care and a bit of luck, I follow him undetected through an almost deserted station. Where on earth are we going here?

Outside the station Kev sets off without a pause, not west into the night-lit throb of Mott Haven, but east across Bruckner Boulevard and under the booming truck-roar of the Elevated Expressway. From here on, civilisation ends, for beyond this echoing space of concrete columns stretches the industrial district of Hunts Point. As Kev exits the Boulevard up Lafayette Avenue, I glance down at the rusty railroad in the cutting beneath us. From what I know about this grimy peninsula we’re heading into here, I decide we’d better conclude there can be no redeeming purpose whatsoever for Kev’s journey tonight. I follow him nevertheless, right onto Tiffany Street, keeping my distance.

In the daytime this corner of the Bronx is dominated by the rumble of trucks along Hunts Point Avenue to the wholesale food market at the end; and by traffic connected with the numerous chop-shops engaged in the business of breaking up stolen cars in order to sell off their components, many such establishments being staffed by mean-looking guard-dogs at the entrance, to ensure an attentive front-of-house welcome. By night the peninsula’s main trades are drugs, and sex for drugs.

Flitting through the shadows in between these yellow street lights, I keep a block behind Kev. Turning left on Randall Avenue, we pass a little corner bar whose name, Manny’s, shines green and red on two young prostitutes, one black and one Hispanic. Their painted faces smile and coo, first at Kev and then at me. But Kev never wavers in his single-minded, lumbering progress: turning right on Barretto Street, passing other whores who stare at us and whistle; left up Oak Point Avenue, right onto Faile Street and down past a few tent homes and past the very last diner on East Bay Avenue, a tiny shack with diner-style metal on the outside; heading then in silence to the most forsaken reach of all, the grid of avenues by the waterfront.

The darkness and my soft-soled boots make me able to follow him undetected, but my nerves jangle with every block we travel, past rank black alley mouths and chain-link fences. At the bottom of the hill Kev turns to the right, down the last wide, sad strip, Ryawa Avenue. A sewage plant hums on the left, behind a barb-topped fence and a row of dark conifers. Beyond surprise, I find my luck yet holds, as I follow him unseen along the two last blocks to the furthest cul de sac, where the avenue slopes to a slimy pool of water, slick with oil and littered with the crescents of abandoned tyres.

Kev heads on and turns left into shadow. I tiptoe to the corner, peer round and see him stride across a stretch of waste ground to an area of trash heaps and rotting metal bins, step up onto a heap and down the other side, veer to the right and disappear. I glance back, squat down and wait for a minute, but see no further movement. I slink around the corner and follow the fence of the sewage works, on the other side of which stands a line of plastic and brick cylinders, the last one topped by a turret sprouting a thick white tube. A hum hangs thick upon the air, as of engines underground.

Beyond the undergrowth ahead is the gleam of the East River. Craning up to peer over the reeds and across the water, I see Riker’s Island, where the grey-striped façade of the prison is lit up yellow-white, near a plume of steam and two tall chimneys. Over on the right the small hump of North Brother Island sprouts another pair of chimneys; and beside it, the smaller bare blip of South Brother Island breaks the moonlight on the water. Locating a dip in the ground, I huddle down in it and wait for Kev to reappear.

For more about "Apricot Eyes" by Rohan Quine, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/apricot-eyes/

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