False Words

by Mark Von Kyling

  After becoming engrossed in a made-for-TV movie about a woman who was divorcing her husband because he had said she looked fat in her new jeans, he was startled to hear his doorbell ring. While he wasn’t a recluse, he rarely had visitors. And never at this time of the day. Everybody he knew worked regular jobs.

  He went to the door cautiously, fully prepared to either hide or expel the door-to-door salesman or missionary who was most likely on the other side of his door.

  To his surprise, it was neither.

  * * * * *

  A rumpled, out of shape man who, from his clothing and demeanor, was obviously a private detective or something like a private detective, was standing on his front step. He had the washed-up look of a man who used to do something else, but had said fuck it and had resigned himself to doing this instead. Either that or someone had made this career change for him. Regardless, he was dressed in sort of a pseudo-cop-like military outfit which was obviously not regulation. Parminter’s initial instincts were right and the man introduced himself as an investigator and after the preliminary explanations, Parminter invited him in. The man quickly got down to business and told why he was there.

  As the man spoke, Parminter’s head reeled. He was simply flabbergasted. He had gone from getting pissed off at a chicken restaurant to hearing something that was definitely not the norm for his day to day conversation.

  “The person that wrote those novels? Those books are huge,” Parminter said at last. It was the only thing he could think to say.

  “I know,” the private detective sighed. “They sell like crazy. My wife loves that kind of shit.”

  “And who did you say this guy is again?”

  “Terrence Dufresne.”

  “And this is the same Terrence Dufresne who was my freshman year college roommate?”

  “Yes, he was writing under the name, Nate Geralds. And he killed himself. That’s why his parents hired me. They don’t believe that he would do anything like this. They remembered him talking about you so they thought you might have had some contact with him.”

  Parminter sighed. “Well, we were friendly in college and after college a little bit, but we ran in completely different crowds. He was a football player and a real ladies man. One of last times I saw him was quite a few years back. It was at a bar downtown. He said that he was modeling in Europe. I could see it, too. He was in shape and the women certainly liked him.”

  The private detective noted this down in a pad. “Yes, he did do that.”

  Parminter still couldn’t believe it. “Are you sure that he’s the same person as this Nate Geralds? I mean, that guy’s a huge writer and from what I can remember Terry was so dyslexic that he couldn’t even write a sentence correctly. I mean the poor guy would struggle to even write his name and he even had some sort of machine and a special tutor to help him read. He said that if it wasn’t for his scholarship he wouldn’t even have been able to go to college.”

  The private detective nodded. “Yes, his parents said that he had overcome a lot and they weren’t really sure how he did it either.

  “But why did he kill himself?”

  The private detective shrugged. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. If he killed himself that is.”

  “Well, I didn’t have anything to do with it. As I said, I haven’t spoken to him in years.”

  “Oh, I know. This is nothing like that. No one is accusing you or anything. It’s just that his parents said that he had a very high opinion of you. You were nice to him. He always talked about that.”

  “Well, he was easy to be nice too,” Parminter said. “But he was sort of gullible, if you know what I mean. People liked to take advantage of him. I always tried to look out for him when we were living together. I didn’t think it was a big deal though.”

  “Well, he appreciated it.”

  After a few more questions, the private detective left and Parminter was even more dumbfounded than he was to begin with.

  * * * * *

  It took some time for Parminter to process what he had just heard. After the private detective had left, he had gone back into his living room, poured himself another whiskey and sat down. The movie was still on but he could no longer focus on it. This wasn’t exactly the kind of thing one heard every day.

  He had shared a dorm room with Terry Dufresne when he was a freshman in college. While the two had been friendly as roommates, they had shared nothing in common. Parminter was quite sophisticated in a wet-behind-the-ears-just-out-of-high-school kind of way, while Terry, was, to put it bluntly, a bit simpleminded. He was nice, yes, but he was no intellectual giant. Not in the least. And that was before you even got into his learning disabilities.

  In a word, Terry Dufresne was not very bright, severely learning disabled or not and if he hadn’t been able to get a scholarship from his football ability, there was no way he would ever have been able to go to college. He was just unable to either read or construct a sentence normally. He had to have tutors and other assistance, provided by the university as a condition of his scholarship, of course.

  But he never seemed to let it get him down. He had a great smile, good attitude and was generally quite amiable to everyone who knew him. Even after he was injured and had to quit playing football, he still seemed to be in good spirits. Of course, since he no longer could play, he lost his tutor and subsequently his scholarship, but even this didn’t get him down. He was just a really upbeat guy. He had to leave college after this, but he still had options. He was quite good looking and in very good shape and went to Europe immediately afterwards to be a model. That was the last that Parminter had had any real prolonged contact with him. The couple of times that Parminter had run into him after that, he had seemed to be quite successful and happy. But that had been several years earlier. Long before the Nate Gerald’s phenomenon had occurred.

  Still a little shocked and a little confused, Parminter was filled with questions. Could he have outgrown his disabilities? Parminter wondered. Somehow he doubted it. It just didn’t seem possible. Something smelled funny about the situation. He moved over to his computer and decided to research the great author and sentimentalist, Nate Geralds.

  Parminter was realistic. He felt sad about Terry’s suicide but was experienced enough not to fall into the usual trap that befalls most people in these situations. Guilt. Most people immediately feel guilt when they hear that someone they know has killed themselves. Could they have helped? What if they had made more of an effort to stay in contact? It’s not unusual to feel like this, but Parminter knew this was only the work of an overactive ego. Playing the savior in a troubled person’s life is a sucker bet. If Terry had wanted to stay in contact, he would have done it. People grow apart, even if they still consider themselves to be good friends. Also, it was apparent that Terry seemed to have a lot going on.

  Parminter knew a little bit about his books because they were so pervasive in culture. Completely formulaic and each and everyone a blowout success. One of his most successful books was called The Tapping Block. It was about a young floor installer who gets amnesia from some sort of construction related head trauma and the only thing he can remember are Shakespearean quotes. After a short period of time, a young intellectual writer falls in love with him because she thinks he’s either an actor or a professor. One day, they’re at her apartment and he starts remembering stuff. The thing that starts triggering his memory is when he hears someone pecking on a tapping block to install some laminate floor in the apartment next door. The main focus of the book is will the young intellectual stay in love with him once she realizes that he’s just a humble floor installer? Or will she leave? The kicker is he knows the Shakespeare from a high school English class. It’s the only memory that comes back to him. This is because high school was the best time of his life.

  Each and every book was a variation on this theme.

  Parminter took another sip of his drink as he perused the author’s website that had been set up by t
he publisher. Even though he already knew it, he was still a little shocked when he saw Gerald’s picture. He was indeed the same person as Terry Dufresne. He was approximately the same age as Terry. He also came from roughly the same area and, like Terry, had played football.

  After that, things got a little sketchy.

  According to the bio, Nate Geralds was a former football player who had gotten injured in college and had subsequently been rendered unable to play the sport. After that, he had moved back to the family property to pursue his hobby of furniture making as both a vocation and a sort of therapy over having his chosen career cut so tragically short. One day, after many years of this, he had been working on a bureau that was going to a wealthy young widow who, coincidentally, just happened to be connected to the publishing industry. He was thinking about how he was going to hand forge the hardware for the piece when he had looked out across the field and saw this magnificent old chestnut tree. He began to think about the history the thing must have seen, the wagons that must have been parked beneath it, the picnics that must have taken place under it and suddenly a story started forming in his head. Not having a piece of paper readily available, he quickly got a pencil and dashed down the idea on a scrap piece of birch. After he was finished jotting it down, he had gone back to working on the hardware and had forgotten about it. A few weeks later when the young widow had come to inspect her custom bureau, she had seen the words that he had written on the birch and had asked him about it. He told her and she was so moved by the story that she began crying. Unknown to him, she mentioned his story to some of her friends in the publishing industry at a cocktail party a month later and an agent had become interested.

  A week after that, he got a two-million dollar advance on the story and thus had begun the mammoth writing industry that had become Nate Geralds. Every one of his books, which were almost the exact same story, slightly tweaked, had gone on to mega-success. And each one, in turn, had been turned into equally mega-successful movies. In fact, when one looked at the release dates, it was almost like the movies were being made before the books had even been written, Parminter wryly noted.

  Of course, Geralds had started dating the young widow. However, she had eventually become stricken with the same dread malady that had coincidentally claimed her former husband. Naturally, Geralds had stayed at her bedside until she died vowing to dedicate a large portion of his income to defeating the disease. He dedicated each book to her.

  It was just too much. It was like every detail surrounding Nate Geralds truly was the stuff of a grandmother’s wetdream. His story was also curiously like something from one of his books. It was just too good to be true.

  Was this the same guy? His college roommate who had been unable to write? Parminter just wasn’t convinced.

  * * * * *

  After he had started thinking about the situation, Parminter realized that the best thing he could do was to go and visit his former roommate’s parents. They were about four hours away in a neighboring state. He didn’t really have that much going on work-wise that needed his direct attention or couldn’t be handled with a smart phone, so he thought that a road trip was in order. He couldn’t help but note that how odd it was that he hadn’t thought about Terry in years, but now he was dominating his every thought.

  He left his McMansion in the Conquistador Meadows subdivision the following morning and started towards his destination. He was able to find the parents’ phone number on the internet. The father was now retired from the phone company and the mother had been a teacher. They had said that they would very much like to talk to him and were looking forward to seeing him again. Parminter had once met them briefly when they had brought Terry to college.

  He also called his ex-wife, Robin, before he left and talked to her about it. She was a police detective. They had been college sweethearts but had broken up after the kids had come along. Robin had remarried the man with whom she had been having an affair not long after. He was on the SWAT team. While this had happened years ago, Parminter still had feelings of resentment occasionally, but realized that Robin hadn’t been happy with him and that Freddy, her new husband, was, in truth, a nice guy. Things just happen, sometimes. She remembered Terry from college and said that she would request a copy of the police report and promised to let him know if she found out anything weird. She had been equally surprised as Parminter to find out that he was Nate Geralds. She was actually a fan of his books and had once remarked on how much the author resembled Parminter’s old roommate.

  On the drive, Parminter tried to make sense of the whole thing. Terry had hanged himself at his estate, in the woodshop, but hadn’t left a note. This was common knowledge. To Parminter, the bigger question was how had Terry become this famous author in the first place? How had he even gotten to the point that he could even write? To Parminter that would have been yet another jewel in the sentimental crown that was the back-story of Terry’s alter-ego, Nate Geralds. Yet, for some reason, it was not even mentioned. This was just peculiar. And why would he kill himself? Yes, his girlfriend had died, but that was years earlier. He had apparently dated other women since. It just didn’t add up.

  Parminter finally arrived at Terry’s parents’ house later that day. It was a nice house, an older brick rancher, but nothing that fancy. It was obvious that they had lived in it for years and was exactly the kind of house that one would expect people like them to own. The parents had been waiting for him. Even though they were still clearly grieving, they greeted him warmly.

  After they had gotten him some coffee and had small-talked about the weather and the traffic on his trip there, they began talking about their son.

  “John, I hope that you didn’t mind that the private detective questioned you. You were one of the only people from the college days that Terry still talked about,” the mother said.

  “No, I didn’t mind at all. Anything to help.”

  The father leaned in. “He really looked up to you. He said that you didn’t make fun of the fact that he had trouble reading and writing like the other smart people. That meant a lot to him.”

  “Well, I’m glad he considered me to be smart,” Parminter said and laughed, trying to lighten the mood.

  They laughed too.

  “He was always such a nice guy,” Parminter added. “I don’t know how anyone could be mean to him. Especially over something like that.”

  “That was his problem,” his father said. “He was too nice. He was naive. He was a good-looking boy, but people would take advantage of him because he wanted to be liked by everybody.”

  “I think he had low self-esteem because of his learning disability,” his mother said. “That’s why it was good that you were nice to him.”

  “I see,” Parminter said. What they said was the truth. He was a very handsome fellow, but he had a tendency to believe what anybody told him or do what anybody told him if it would get him a little bit of a approval. He had gotten taken advantage of repeatedly. Parminter had helped him in this regard on several occasions.

  They sat in silence for a few seconds before the mother suddenly put her coffee cup down. “John, we don’t know what’s going on with all this, but we don’t think he killed himself. He just wasn’t the type. He was a happy person.”

  “And rich,” his father added. “Why would someone who was in that position do something like that?”

  Parminter shrugged. He didn’t have an answer.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “So, how was he able to overcome his learning disability?” Parminter asked.

  “Oh, he didn’t,” the mother said.

  Parminter almost dropped his coffee. “But he was a writer?”

  “I know,” his father laughed to himself. “It’s amazing. He was one of the most successful authors in the world but couldn’t write a sentence to save his life. Couldn’t even write an email or a text. It used to drive his agent crazy.”

  “But how was he able to do it?”
Parminter asked at a loss for words.

  “He said it was a secret,” the mother said. “He said that we couldn’t tell anybody about it or he would get in trouble with his publisher.”

  “I’ve always thought he had a machine or a computer, you know like the one he had in college,” the father said. “You know, like a dictaphone.”

  Parminter nodded. He had never heard of anything like this, but didn’t say anything.

  “Yes,” the mother added. “I’ve always thought it was something like that too. He met all kinds of people when he was a model. I’m sure one of them took a liking to him and helped him get something that would make his life easier when it came to stuff like that.”

  Parminter nodded again. “Yes, I’m sure it was something like that.”

  * * * * *

  “So, that’s where they stuck you, Terry?” Parminter said to himself as he looked down at the simple grave of his old roommate. Oddly enough, the grave had no marking that would denote it as the resting place of a bestselling author or anything else other for that matter. It was simple and to the point. It had Terry’s name, date of birth, date of death and the words, “Beloved Son.” That was it. This was a little strange, but then again, it was exactly as he had been told it would be.

  The grave he was looking at was only a few miles from the parents’ house. It was in a well-shaded family plot at an old church that the Dufresne family had attended since it had been founded sometime after the Civil War. Honeysuckle filled the air and wildflowers grew nearby. One could even hear cows mooing in the distance. It was a very pretty place and a very peaceful spot to be buried. It was the way people were buried in the old days before there was so much traffic and so many people in the world.

  As Parminter stood there looking at the grave, he suddenly felt a presence behind him. He turned around and saw a young woman approaching him. She looked Latina. She was rather small and attractive, but gave off an edginess that was hard not to ignore.