The Night Friends

By Jeff Tompkins

New York City, the late 1990s. Dennis Donnelley is a bachelor and a solitary soul in his early thirties who works in the downtown financial district but isn’t sure where he fits into the city’s new anything-goes money culture. Increasingly haunted by the sense that life is passing him by, Dennis begins hitting bars in order to relieve his anxieties, and he also starts to roam the streets at random after dark.

One night he decides to head up to Central Park, where a chance encounter leads to his becoming friendly with three misfit teenagers who also see the park as their refuge. Most prominent of the teens is Christine Pfarr, a troubled sixteen-year-old with her own fondness for alcohol. The older man begins to develop an unexpected rapport with Christine—or so he thinks. As Dennis is drawn deeper into the park’s shadowy, after-hours netherworld, a series of fraught misunderstandings unfolds, culminating in a nightmarish final scene of hallucinatory intensity.

Inspired by a real-life crime that shocked New York City, "The Night Friends" marks the uncompromising debut of a talented new writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Tompkins
• Release date: Sep 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301022694

Jeff Tompkins

Jeff Tompkins was born in Hartford, CT and graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Literature and Society. Today he is a writer and comics artist living in New York City. The author of two novels — "The Night Friends" (2012) and "Traveling Light" (2015) — he also writes for The Brooklyn Rail, among other outlets.

Book preview

The Night Friends

A Novel

By Jeff Tompkins

Copyright 2012 Jeff Tompkins

Smashwords Edition

CHAPTER ONE

A time came when the bars weren’t enough for Dennis Donnelley any longer.

It happened on a Monday night, the week before Memorial Day. He’d hardly left the office when the familiar restlessness began to nag at him, and he even went and had a pint at one of his favorite establishments, a Blarney Stone a few blocks west of where he worked. But sitting there on his stool, fingering his grimy coaster and staring out the front window at all the other nine-to-fivers heading up Trinity Place, he knew he was only kidding himself. He needed something new this evening, something—different. Maybe it was because the city was enjoying its first genuine warm spell after a rainy spring, but some long-dormant instinct inside him now chafed at the thought of his regular routine. A couple of beers, a little bit of a buzz, and then the train back home to Brooklyn: suddenly it seemed like meager fare, and he couldn’t believe that was all it had taken to satisfy him these past few months.

This new voice urging him on, he decided, was as strong in its own way as his original need to wander the streets after work had been, back in the late winter. That meant he would most likely ignore it at his own risk. He drained his glass and nodded at the bartender on his way out the door.

Dennis paused on the sidewalk for a moment before he began to walk north. Squinting against the light, he told himself, I know what your problem is. You want action. He wouldn’t have been able to define specifically what he intended by the word, but he knew he had a hankering for stimuli outside of what his regular rounds afforded. It had to be something other than a bar, or another night at home in front of the box. Some women to look at wouldn’t hurt either, he reflected, and his desire made him smile. Even me, he thought. Spring in the air, a day like today, and even I can feel the sap starting to rise.

(Anyone passing Dennis at that moment, if they considered him at all, would have noted a man of average build, with a head of brown hair he let grow slightly longer than was perhaps ideal for him, and a mustache kept carefully trimmed as if in compensation for the hair—the mustache whose original inspiration, it must be confessed, had been Keith Hernandez, the idol of Dennis’s adolescence. More than that, if the bystander had lingered any longer he might have noticed a perpetually distracted air, as though this unassuming figure standing in front of the bar labored under invisible burdens known only to himself.)

A fresh breeze blew against Dennis’s face, one that smelled so good he knew it must have come off the river to the west, and it was as though all his unsettled yearning came together in this one sensation of the wind on his cheek. No wonder he’d been so uncomfortable in the bar just now: he needed to be outside for a while, enjoying what was left of this day. He considered heading west; there was supposed to be a beautiful new promenade there, over by the Hudson, that you could walk along all the way up to Fourteenth Street. But just as quickly he rejected the idea. He couldn’t quite have said why, only that he somehow intuited the promenade wouldn’t be right for his purposes. A long thin strip of park along the water, packed with sun-worshippers; it lacked a certain—depth.

The answer came to him in a flash. It was about time he tried walking on some grass for a change, instead of simply admiring it in the baseball fields he saw on TV. When’s the last time I was in Central Park, he wondered. He had his solution. If there was any place to enjoy such terrific weather, that was it. And the park was huge. He could be surrounded by people if he decided, or he could keep to himself; if he didn’t like one particular section there were plenty of other areas to explore. It would practically be an adventure.

Dennis couldn’t remember the last time he had acted with this kind of impulsiveness; couldn’t remember, now that he thought of it, the last time he had made room for any kind of spontaneity in his life. He was so pleased with his sudden inspiration that it was only a short step further, from there, to decide that one more thing would provide the perfect complement to the occasion. Of course: a drink. He would brown-bag a beer and smuggle it into the park in his knapsack. He could already envision some tranquil setting—a shady glen—and him settled comfortably inside it, sipping on a tall boy. Dennis chuckled. Now that would be getting back to nature—his way.

It was strange, then, that he should be momentarily checked by second thoughts once he was inside the nearest Korean deli, standing by the cooler. As he surveyed the immaculate rows of aluminum cans through the polished glass a question popped into his mind with startling clarity: Do I really want to do this? He hesitated there, hand extended midway toward the handle of the refrigerator door, for several seconds; the moment would later remind him of those times when he hit the pause button on his VCR in order to freeze the action on screen, except that in this case he was the character in the video and not the guy holding the remote control. He asked himself again: Well, do I want to do this, or not? He felt as if an obscure cautionary impulse, almost tantalizing in its vagueness, was struggling to rouse itself somewhere in the back of his brain. There might be a very good, concrete reason why he should forget this whole idea, get on the train, and go home.

But it hovered just out of reach, and before his doubts could coalesce any further he realized that a man was standing right next to him. At first Dennis thought the man wanted to get at the same section of the cooler he was blocking, and he was about to say Excuse me and step aside, when he realized that the man barely even knew he was there, because he was speaking to someone on a cellular phone.

Don’t worry, he was saying now, you can always crunch the numbers. Yeah, I’ll back you up.

Dennis eyed the man covertly for a second, and already felt his hackles beginning to rise. Clean cut, fresh-faced, and in the ritual uniform—khakis, button-down dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. One of the new princes, without a doubt. Dennis wasn’t sure exactly when he’d first become aware of them, but some time within the last year downtown had become flooded with the breed: guys in their twenties—some of them conceivably a whole ten years younger than he was—who never wore suits or ties and who strutted around like they thought they were better than everyone else. High-tech, new economy, all that good stuff. And the cellular phone, for Christ’s sake. They were already becoming so commonplace that Dennis didn’t automatically want to make his Star Trek joke every time he saw one, but they still triggered a certain defensive reaction in him. (He flashed back to the previous summer, down in Ocean Grove, when his sister and her husband had unveiled theirs: the three of them had been sitting in the folding chairs in the backyard when Gary brandished the phone in his hand as though it was gold plated and Dennis understood he was supposed to show some kind of reaction. What, he’d said, you guys get a new cordless? No, Denny, Karen had said, with the air of bottomless patience she always adopted when she was explaining something she obviously regarded as fundamentally simple to her older brother, "it’s a cellular.")

Wonder Boy was still carrying on his high-stakes business call in the middle of the aisle. Well, we’re hoping to get more granular with that, he said, Brendan knows that. Dennis opened the door to the cooler and extracted not the sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser and not the twenty-ounce but a twenty-four-ounce, a shining cylindrical beast with the length and heft of a good-sized thermos.

After he had paid and was out on the street again, he realized his misgivings had disappeared as abruptly as they arrived; all it took was one overheard snatch of conversation and the rightness of his errand had been reaffirmed for him. Twenty-four ounces or not, it was still just one beer, which meant he’d only be able to get into so much trouble. Reveling once more in the air and the sun, Dennis made his way towards the 1 train at Chambers Street. Next stop, Central Park.

During the ride he was able to distract himself with a few reminiscences. Stashing the beer in his backpack had reminded him of a period in his early twenties when he and his buddies had taken to stoop-sitting in the summertime. The poor man’s night out, they liked to call it. All just out of college, they would routinely kill a couple of hours on a Friday night, in Brooklyn or in certain side streets in the East Village, sitting on somebody’s front steps, nursing their brown-bagged cans or bottles, and enjoying the passing spectacle. Eventually you’d have to get up and go find a place to relieve yourself, but aside from that relative inconvenience it had usually been a lot of fun.

Except that was a long time ago, he thought—the early Nineties, the opposite end of the decade, already a distinct historical era. It was hard to imagine doing any stoop-sitting now. Most of those friends he didn’t see anymore, and more than that, these days, in the middle of 1998, if you wanted to try spending a Friday night right on the street with an open container of alcohol in your hands, well, good luck to you. With Giuliani’s quality-of-life squad on patrol, maybe you’d make it out of jail in time to get to work on Monday morning.

But the park, that might be something else. As he rode uptown it wasn’t so much a plan he had in mind as a vague notion that a guy setting out on his own, who looked as though he knew where he was going and kept off the main drags, could pretty well do as he pleased up there. Bearing in mind a certain need to be careful, of course. Common sense. Actually, he decided with some amusement, it wouldn’t be that much different than a good part of what he did at Hamilton Financial all day. In the office no one bothered you either, as long as you carried a piece of paper in your hand and looked like you knew where you were headed. Pleased at the thought that his job skills might have unexpected real-world applications, he exited the train at Columbus Circle with a renewed sense of mission.

It had been years since Dennis’s last trip to Central Park, but what struck him as he approached the entrance at the southwest corner was how much everything looked exactly the way he remembered it. There were the crowds of people milling around, several with the tell-tale camera and brightly-colored clothing of the out-of-towner, and there was the newsstand over on his left, and over on the right, towards Fifty-Ninth Street, stood a couple of carriage horses, idling between fares. He smelled the horses in the same instant he saw them, and glancing downward he noticed, sure enough, a fluffy mound of tan turds beneath the lead animal. It was funny, he reflected, but he couldn’t remember ever having objected to the smell of horse manure in New York City. Compared to so many of the other odors you were regularly forced to put up with here, it was almost comforting, somehow; as though it made you nostalgic for a childhood that wasn’t even your own. Then, as if to prove the point, he passed a vendor hawking those sugary roasted peanuts some people inexplicably liked to eat, and the cloying scent that wafted from the man’s cart was almost enough to make him gag. Nothing comforting about that smell at all, he told himself. He quickened his pace and stepped into the park.

The roadway inside was even more crowded than the entrance. In the moments between when Dennis first saw the road a few yards ahead of him and when he reached the nearest crosswalk, he must have seen dozens of them go past: joggers, rollerbladers, and cyclists, all hurtling down from the curve to his left and hanging suspended in his view for a split-second before they just as abruptly vanished around the bend on the right. A great human loop, perpetually spinning counterclockwise through the heart of the park. The impression of speed they generated was dizzying, even to someone with both feet firmly rooted on the curb; Dennis wondered briefly if there wasn’t some kind of race going on, before recalling that he’d heard from somebody in the office that it was always like this in the spring and summer.

The light took its own time about changing, and now that he had a moment to study them more carefully Dennis was somewhat startled by how good-looking all these Olympians were. As a lifelong New Yorker he would have guessed that he’d grown relatively inured to physical attractiveness, but the sheer extravagance, the sculpted perfection, of the bodies careening past him now as he waited for the light held him virtually spellbound; it was all he could do not to stop and stare, slack-jawed, at some of the women floating, flying, gliding by. Again, he decided, that was probably just because he hadn’t been getting out enough. Brooklyn had its contenders, sure, but there was really no competition: the serious glamour, the beautiful people, could all be found up here. Where the money was.

He sensed something unpleasant looming in the turn of his thoughts and resolved to dispel it. Come on, he chided himself, you’re here to relax, not get worked up over pretty faces. Don’t you have some beer to drink, too? The reminder helped restore his spirits as he crossed the roadway and cut away into a less populated area, above Sheep Meadow.

North of the boathouse he set his sights on a low hill surmounted by a stand of trees. He reached the top of it, stretched out on the grass with the sun at his back, and surveyed the scene in front of him. He had a vague idea he was somewhere in the Seventies, not too far up, but the trees and bushes were so dense in every direction all he could make out were a few more small hills like the one he had commandeered and a path running north-south. He hoisted the beer from his knapsack and, still keeping the can in the brown paper bag, popped it open and took his first sip. A cold one always did taste even better outside; it had been too long since he was reminded of that fact. Of course, downing a whole twenty-four-ounce might mean that he’d have to go piss in the bushes before he got on the train to Brooklyn, but given how comfortable he felt now that would be a price worth paying. It would be darker by then anyway.

Within a few swallows Dennis felt the Bud going straight to his head. He‘d have to slow down if he didn’t want to drain the tall boy right away—if that happened he’d only want to drink more, and there wasn’t exactly a refill anywhere within reach. He lay back with his hands behind his neck and tried to concentrate on letting the tension seep out of his body.

The branches overhead formed a near-perfect canopy. He could hardly see the evening sky through the leaves at all. In here, too, the scent of the trees and bushes was so strong it reminded him of a woman’s perfume. Or maybe that was the grass. A clean smell, in any case.

He had almost achieved a state approaching real relaxation when a noise distracted him and he raised his head in time to see—bingo!—two young girls in short skirts sauntering in his direction. One was speaking to the other in Spanish and she swung her pocketbook with a languid grace. As they passed directly in front of him Dennis was careful not to look either of them in the eye, but once they were further down the path he sat up and allowed himself to linger appreciatively on the backs of their legs.

It never failed, he thought. Every year in New York there was always that one week in the spring when you felt as though you’d never even seen the opposite sex before, and the bounty on display was like some kind of reward you were granted for having made it through the winter. Some days you’d swear your eyeballs were going to pop right out of your head.

Ah, the ladies. Dennis was hardly comfortable contemplating any of the things he had let slide in his life, but women, and how little interaction he had with them (as a grown, supposedly adult male), were a topic that made him particularly uneasy. It must have been a measure of how loosened up he felt now that he could even consider the subject with any kind of objectivity. The number of women he had genuinely gone out with he could count on one hand—and nowadays, he thought ruefully, one hand was what it came down to—but back in college and into the first half of his twenties there had at least been the semblance of activity, some kind of incremental progress. Of course his mother had still been alive then and his sister Karen still lived in the city too, and they were always on his case about meeting people, making introductions at barbeques, Christmas parties, Easter dinners. Whereas in his current existence, here on the thinking side of thirty, romance was like an exclusive club that only other people were let into. Really the few women he did know nowadays were his co-workers at Hamilton: he was unfailingly cordial to them, and they to him, and occasionally there was even some flirting at the company holiday party. But he knew that as Office Manager he shouldn’t entertain too many ideas in that direction. Look but don’t touch.

He could delude himself into believing he was getting by reasonably enough. He had his secure position at a financial services firm. He had his comfortable one-bedroom apartment in Windsor Terrace—and in it, a TV set that was practically the size of a ping-pong table and a fridge stocked with microbrews from the corner deli. But every so often, he thought, when you got a chance to see what was actually out there, as he had a little while ago with the women on rollerblades, you were surprised to find out how much it—hurt.

Dennis was still lost in these thoughts some time later when a man emerged onto the path a few feet in front of him. He was tall, thin, and black, and also close enough that Dennis had just started to take in details of his appearance—a beard, a face that had seen some wear, and a long, loping stride—when he noticed that the other man was looking directly at him. Their eyes met for an instant before the other man jerked his head back in the direction he had come from, and then nodded at Dennis. Dennis didn’t quite understand the significance of the gesture but almost without realizing what he was doing he calmly unzipped his knapsack, stood it up on the slope beside him, and put his beer inside it. He placed the can carefully on the bottom of the knapsack so as not to spill any.

With his hand still inside the bag, he happened to look up. Two uniformed police officers were walking on the path directly where the man had been a few seconds earlier. Dennis gave them a half-smile and pulled that day’s Daily News from his bag. They only regarded him stone-faced and continued on their way.

He understood what had just happened only when the policemen were gone from view, and though he sat there outwardly as still as before Dennis realized his pulse was racing. Well, he thought, that could have been an interesting little encounter. Guess I owe that dude who walked by first. It was possible the cops would have simply told him to pour out the beer and left it at that, but he couldn’t be sure. He might just as easily have gotten the fine and a nice little ride to the station house. And he knew that even a reprimand and a warning—We’ll let you off easy this time, fella, but…—would have left him fuming for the rest of the night. He considered himself a law-abiding citizen; there had after all been that great-uncle, his own kin and a figure of legend among the Donnelley clan, who put in thirty years on the force. But encounters with authority made Dennis uncomfortable. They inspired in him the fear that he was somehow going to be found out—of exactly what, he couldn’t say for sure, but it was a low-level paranoia he had lived with nearly all his life. He was convinced they were always looking to bust you for something, so you needed to keep your head down.

He could finish the beer by letting it sit in the backpack and taking a sip every couple of minutes. That way, in fact, he’d even make it last longer, and if he passed the cops on his way out of the park, he could hail them: Guys, you helped me keep the buzz going, so thanks a lot.

Excited by the idea he might have dodged a bullet, Dennis began to enjoy himself again. The light had changed perceptibly in the last several minutes and he saw that whereas earlier the green in the trees and bushes had been saturated with yellow, now it was as though everything around him was taking on a different shade of blue.

That was a cool thing that guy did for me just now, he thought. Plus it was odd that he himself had understood, without consciously understanding, what the man had been trying to convey, and stashed the beer back in his bag. The notion that a total stranger would have tipped him off like that, and saved him from being busted with an open container of alcohol, only added to his air of well-being. Now if he hadn’t come up here tonight, if he’d stayed at a bar downtown before going home to Brooklyn, he would have never had an opportunity to see such a selfless display of human nature. So this had been the right idea.

And, he conceded, he shouldn’t be too hard on those cops, either. If they were patrolling the park in pairs that meant it was probably a safer place than it used to be. The scumbags would all have to hang out somewhere else, so upstanding citizens like him—Dennis couldn’t help smiling—would be left to drink their beer in peace.

It was a constant wonder, the things you were willing to contemplate doing when you were drunk as opposed to when you were sober. Like hanging around in Central Park at night, for instance. He certainly wouldn’t have pictured himself here, at this hour, when he got out of bed that morning; just as he couldn’t have guessed that something as simple as coming up to the park would make him so happy. A failure of imagination, that’s what that was, he thought, and instantly decided he’d hit on the problem area in his life. Getting out, new scenery, unfamiliar faces: these things seldom occurred to him even as possibilities, so of course he hadn’t known—as the saying went—what he was missing.

As he reached the bottom of the can Dennis knew he should begin to think about heading home. But he felt so relaxed it seemed a shame to dispel the mood already. He had a hunch that as soon as he left the shadowy confines of the park—as soon as he was confronted with the blare of traffic and the endless wait for his endless subway ride home—his equanimity would vanish as surely as the sun that was sinking at his back. By the time he stepped off the train in Brooklyn he would be plain, frazzled Dennis again, another loser shuffling home to recover from that day’s grind, and gird himself for the next.

Well, screw that. No harm in giving it another fifteen minutes. He would just get onto one of the main paths or the road on his way out, something with a lot of lights and plenty of other pedestrians, and he would be fine. By then the train might be less crowded anyway. He swirled the last of the beer in the can and took a sip. It was basically just backwash left but for once he didn’t mind the taste.

Twilight had settled on the park in earnest now, and in the enveloping violet softness it was getting harder to determine any kind of depth in the trees and bushes all around him: they had an interesting one-dimensional quality in this light that he had never seen before. Either that or it was time to get his damn eyes checked. He realized that the insect sounds in the air had been growing steadily louder for the last several minutes, too: a cumulative crackle, with a steady one-two-three-four rhythm that didn’t seem to vary no matter how long he concentrated on it. What were they called? Cicadas? It was the sort of noise you associated with your childhood and almost never consciously noticed as an adult, if you even heard it at all. Then he thought he caught some Latin music coming from somebody’s boom box, how far away he couldn’t tell. Ordinarily it wasn’t what Dennis would have cared to listen to but in these surroundings, he had to admit, it had an agreeably