It intimidates without apparent threat, not looking live or lethal, rough with rust, in the Mott Haven freight yard where we played after school in the chill engulfing dusk.

Playing a kind of blind man’s bluff with death, we laughed to leap across it with clenched eyes — immortal in ourselves — tough scraggly kids testing the fragility of limb and breath.

Still nondescript it waits — assassin, friend — in dim waste places where we least expect to die: the demon rail of the quotidian no one can touch or recognize again.