The Hoaxer

A SHORT STORY

JD Hancock

MY FATHER was a hoaxer. In his spare time and with no thought of profit, the way other men fish or build radios from kits, he perpetuated frauds against the public. He did his share for the popular phantoms—Big Foot, extraterrestrials, ghosts—while promoting a number of minor phenomena that were, I like to think, closer to his heart. Some of these lesser-known entities, such as the Minnesota Lionbird and a strange condition known as Burning Snow, had a basis in folklore and merely required a plaster-cast footprint or a blurry snapshot to refresh their legends. They were the easy ones. More difficult to foist upon the public were the myths and marvels dreamed up by my father himself, monsters such as Howling Johnny, the mummified wolfboy of Glacier National Park, whose shrunken, rodent-gnawed body was my father’s crowning achievement. In the world of scientific fakery, a world more extensive than outsiders know, the man was an original. He was not impressed with ordinary oddities. Indeed, I like to believe that my father had high hopes for his deceptions and thought of himself as a teacher—though of what set of truths or values, I don’t know. I do know what it was like to live with him, and what it is like now without him.

It’s early, a couple of hours before dawn—time to drive out to a nearby cornfield and make it look like something landed there. I am thirteen years old, an eighth grader, and this is my first time. My father sits up high behind the wheel of his four-wheel-drive Ford pickup truck, steering with one finger, and I can tell by his locked-ahead gaze and unaccustomed silence that I am on probation. We pass dark farmhouses flanked by looming silos. Bats dive and bank in our high beams. The cross breeze through the rolled-down windows smells of rain-soaked earth, of night crawlers drowned by the thousands. I feel anxious, tired, and honored. My father woke me up this morning when he easily could have snuck out alone.

“Under the seat there. The thermos,” he says, and I am quick to reach down and grab the bottle. Its cap, which I unscrew, is a cup. I fill it only halfway to prevent a spill and place it in my father’s outstretched hand. The steam from the Postum fogs his eyeglasses and he sets the cup on the dash to let it cool. The glasses are dummies (I tried them on once, the lenses were plain glass), and my father’s refusal to leave the house without them is just another trick. He has even developed certain tics, such as blinking when he puts the glasses on or suddenly acting blind while wearing them and whipping them off to be polished on a shirtsleeve.

My father is not a normal man. I’ve learned this.

“Here’s how you’re going to help me,” he says, holding out the cup for more Postum. Because of his blood pressure, he can’t drink real coffee. “I’ll walk to the field and make the circle while you sit tight in the truck and stand guard. You can turn the radio on, but keep it low. Sound carries miles on a night like this.”

He raises the cup to his lips and blows. He knows I’m disappointed. He had promised when he woke me up that he would show me how to make the circles, how to fabricate a landing site. Guard duty is an insult, a gyp. I’ve been waiting for this day for months, ever since the Sunday night he led me into his workshop after dinner, shut the door so my mother couldn’t hear, and took me into his confidence.

He chose that night to reveal himself, I think, because he’d been fighting all weekend with my mother and he wanted the companionship. The fight was the same one they were always having, about my mother’s demands for affection and for material things. So far as I knew, their argument had started well before I was born, which may have been why my parents’ yelling didn’t bother me: I’d heard the racket so often it had become elemental, expected. In fact, the quarrels often made me sleepy, and I would wake up when the screaming stopped.

My father was calming himself with a cigarette when he sat me down at the drafting desk in his tidy, fluorescent-lit workshop. He showed me an album of newspaper clippings dating back to the year I was born. The articles dealt with mysterious events that I, a straight-A science student, immediately knew to be made-up. My father read some of the headlines aloud in an anchorman’s phony baritone: “‘Ogden Boy Scouts Report Strange Lights’; ‘Grizzly on the Vegas Strip?’” He shut the album and asked me what I thought.

“Somebody was playing pranks,” I said. “There aren’t any grizzly bears in Nevada.”

“Correct,” my father said, and he gave me a deep, long squinting stare.

“Was it you who did those things?” I asked.

He put a heavy, warm hand on my shoulder.

“It’s a hobby, Travis. It started back in engineering school, me and some buddies goofing around. Believe me, I’m not the only one who does this.”

I nodded as if I already knew that.

“There are lots of us,” my father said, “spread out all over the country. We’re professionals, mostly. Intelligent men. Does that make sense to you?”  

I waited for him to make it make sense, but suddenly he seemed distant and anxious, caught up in his thoughts. He shut his eyes and reached under his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. I wondered if he was regretting his decision to let me in on his secret life. I hoped not. I hadn’t wanted to know about this stuff, but now that I did, I needed to know it all.

“Do you ever meet up?” I said. “Is this a club?”

“We are a club,” he said, opening his eyes, “but not one that meets. Not meeting is the point. We’d rather pick up a newspaper, read about a Bigfoot track discovered in Wyoming, say, and realize another one of us is out there. It’s our way of saying hello to one another. Of sending smoke signals.”

I said I understood and for the rest of the evening I asked no more questions, just sat there with the album on my knee as my father disclosed true stories behind various clippings. The Ogden UFO scare, for example, was the result of panicky phone calls to several late-night disc jockeys. By changing his voice for each call and varying his descriptions of the spacecraft, my father had stimulated other sightings throughout a four-state area and over the course of the following three nights. He said I was sick with the croup at the time and neither he nor my mother could sleep; whenever she got up to quiet me, he would sneak down to the basement and monitor the reports of fresh sightings on a police-band radio. By the second night, he said, the hoax had developed a life of its own.

“That happens sometimes. You forget you started it. But then you remember and that’s what makes it fun.”

We turned a few more album pages, and afterward, my father made me swear to keep our conversation to myself. Not a word about the altered Polaroids that proved the existence of the Vegas grizzly. Nor a breath about the St. Paul taxidermist who fashioned the Lionbird remains my father had sold to an Iron Range museum. As I made my vow, I could hear my mother through the door noisily cleaning the dinner plates. I sensed that whomever else my father’s jokes were on, they were mostly on her.

Still, I made a promise. My father’s odd pastime became our secret, despite the wall it immediately placed between me and everyone else in the world. And that’s why on this morning six months later, the morning of the crop circles, I will settle for nothing less than full and equal participation.

“But we don’t need a guard,” I say. “Nobody’s going to come by here. It’s not even four o’clock yet.”

“You don’t know farmer’s hours,” my father says, pumping the brakes and stopping the truck. “Every wonder why it’s country people who see all the UFOs? They’re up so early. Still half dreaming when they do their chores.”

He backs the truck off the paved country road and onto a grassy two-track, proceeding for twenty or thirty yards, until we are safe behind a clump of sumac. Wordlessly, we climb out of the cab and walk around to the back to unload our tools: a coil of rope and a long metal stake with a swivel eyelet. I consider what we are about to do together. In just a couple of hours we will be back in our normal lives—me at school and my father in his office—but the circle will be out here, waiting, ready to drive people crazy…

By the glowing green dial of my father’s watch, the work takes almost two hours. We plant the iron stake in the ground and tie one end of the rope to the swivel ring. I hold the stake with both hands and steady it while my father stretches taut the rope and walks in a series of widening circles, sweeping down the cornstalks as he goes. The noise of the bending and snapping stalks seems bound to give us away, yet no one comes. I hear a dog bark and a new fear hits me: no one will ever see what we’re creating here and the only people the circle will drive crazy will be my father and me, waiting for it to be discovered.

The thought of this makes me feel lonesome, foolish, and as I watch my father sweep the corn down, I wonder what satisfaction there can be in duping people you will never meet and piling up secrets for the sake of it.

Our family moved a lot in those days because my father was always quitting. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hold a job, but that he had no reason to; the moment he felt bored or unappreciated, he left and found another one. His field was computer programming back when that was new, and though he had trouble obtaining promotions because he hadn’t finished engineering school, he never lacked for entry-level offers. For him, obtaining a new position was merely a matter of driving to a city, looking in the yellow pages, and making a few calls from a pay phone. My mother and I would watch him from the truck, wiping circles in the steamed-up windows, since it always seemed to be winter when we moved.

The winter I was fourteen, four months after a startled crop duster discovered the St. Cloud saucer site and all the TV stations went out to film it, my father announced over his morning bran flakes that we would be moving to Rockford, Illinois, as soon as we could pack up the truck. My mother rose from the table when he said this and walked as if in a trance to her bedroom. I heard the screech of wire clothes hangers being ripped from the bar in her closet, followed by snapping suitcase latches. My father sipped from his third mug of Postum and browsed through the latest issue of Popular Mechanics.

“She’s sad,” he said. “That’s natural in a woman. It’s biological. They get attached to places. Through the smells.” His gaze remained fixed on the magazine, whose cover showed plans for a do-it-yourself infrared burglar alarm. “What about you?” he said, turning a page. “You up for Illinois?”

To show solidarity with my angry mother, I frowned and said, “Don’t know,” though the truth was I couldn’t wait to leave St. Cloud. Ever since the uproar surrounding the “Circles of Mystery,” the place had become ridiculous to me, a city of hicks and fools. What’s worse, my school year so far had been disastrous. My classmates had changed during summer vacation, growing sideburns, adopting baffling slang, forming new and strange alliances based on shared tastes in sneakers and haircuts. Being polite to teachers was out and defiant public nose picking was in. These new ways had caught me by surprise and I knew I wouldn’t be able to catch up. My only hope was a fresh start somewhere else where no one remembered my hair in a crew cut and I could claim that math had always bored me.

“Before you go pack your stuff,” my father said, “I want to tell you something.” He closed his magazine. “Travis, a man is just a human being.”

“I know,” I said.

“I know you know. It’s your mother who thinks differently. She thinks I control the universe.”

I listened.

“And I made her think that. I built myself up big. I made her believe I had powers.”

I stood there.

“Women demand it,” my father said. “Then they punish you when they learn the truth.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You ought to be. You’re next.”

I was never quite comfortable with him after that.

The one-story house we rented in Rockford had a partially finished basement. My father spent most of his evenings down there, assembling gizmos from Popular Mechanics and imagining schemes that I wanted no part of but had to hear about anyway. I began to dread eating dinner at home, knowing I might be invited downstairs the moment my mother stood up from the table. My father said she knew nothing of his hobby, that she thought of him as an ordinary tinkerer, and her willingness to leave me alone with him told me he was right. Once or twice a week, he would lead me down into his dungeon, promising to show me “something fascinating.” He was focused then on fake ancient artifacts. I remember handling a set of chisels, a dictionary of Aztec pictographs, some chunks of marble salvaged from old buildings. I remember a long and manic riff concerning the fallibility of the carbon-dating process.

“This notion that things have determinable ages,” I remember my father saying, “is baloney. It’s science’s big lie. The only way to date a thing is to date a more familiar thing that’s near it, and the only way to date that thing, of course—”

“May I go upstairs now, Dad, and watch TV?”

“There’s nothing on.”

“There is, though. There’s a lot on.”

I stopped going home after school. I hung out. My plan to revamp my image had succeeded and I had joined a ninth-grade clique that centered on two cute girls who liked to smoke pot in the park by the river and discuss such things as telepathy and witchcraft and life on other planets. Both Karla and Jan were only-daughters of single mothers who worked, meaning they could do anything they wanted, anytime. I pretended I was equally free, and sometimes I stayed out with them until seven or eight o’clock at night. Their interest in the supernatural made me feel protective toward them, as though my inside knowledge of the subject required me to ease them toward the truth.

“Flying saucers,” I told them once, “are usually just that: plates thrown in the air.”

“So you think humans are the only life-form in all the universe?” Karla said.

“That’s an arrogant view,” Jan said. She was the pretty one, the one I liked.

“I’m saying there aren’t UFOs,” I said. “There might be other life-forms. Moss or something.

“What about Bigfoot?” Karla said. “I mean, do you think everyone just lies?”

“People make things up,” I said. “I can’t believe you don’t know that, Karla.”

“Lay off my friend,” said Jan.

“I’m sorry.”

Jan said, “You’re such a cynic, Travis. God.”

The girls got sick of me soon enough, so I spent my afternoon hours by myself, yelling at older kids driving by in Firebirds, lobbing snowballs at dogs chained up in yards, spitting off freeway overpasses. When I got home, there would be food wrapped in tinfoil in the kitchen and my mother would either be off at Red Cross or in her bedroom reading a Harlequin. My father would be in the basement too busy with his latest creation to notice my arrival. I would eat in front of the TV and fall asleep on the sofa with a show on.

In March, our family moved again, first to Lincoln, Nebraska, for a month, where my father did not even bother to find work because of his dangerously elevated blood pressure. Then he decided on Denver. When he announced this move, my mother phoned her parents in Florida and asked them to send her two plane tickets, one for her and one for me. The tickets arrived a few days later and my father made my mother cash them in and then spend the money on truck repairs. We drove to Colorado in a blizzard, using four-wheel drive the whole way and playing car games like license-plate Scrabble. I sat squeezed in tight between my parents, forming the link and keeping us a family. A thin line down the middle of my body was all that I felt was left of me.

We arrived in downtown Denver at lunchtime. My father ushered us into a diner crowded with businessmen smoking cigarettes and told us to sit at the counter while he made a phone call. He motioned the waitress over and ordered two BLTs and two split pea soups and nothing for himself. On the napkin beside my mother he laid two one-hundred-dollar bills. I remember thinking the money was counterfeit, something my father had printed himself, and that we would go to prison if we used it.

As my father strode off toward the pay phone mounted on the back wall of the restaurant, the collar of his jacket was turned up and his hands were thrust deep in his pockets. That seemed odd to me. I ate some soup. I watched our waitress swirl mayonnaise on toast and lay down parallel strips of wrinkled bacon.

I felt my mother’s hand touch my hand.

“We’re leaving,” she said. “Your father’s gone. Come on. We planned this so there wouldn’t be a scene.”

She picked up the bills and rose from her stool. I turned and looked down the aisle. A man in a suit was talking on the pay phone, covering one ear with his free hand. Next to the phone I saw a door with a lit-up red EXIT sign over it. The door was open slightly and I could see trapped cigarette smoke rushing out through the crack.

“Travis, please,” my mother said. I saw she had the truck keys in her hand. They were on a new ring: a rabbit’s foot.

“We’re giving each other some time to think,” she said. “We’ll probably get back together in a month, with all these little problems ironed out and everyone just as happy as before.”

“He’s coming back?” I said.

“He’s coming back.”

“Do you still love him?” I said.

“I love him dearly.”

My mother could be a hoaxer sometimes, too.

About a year later I went to see my father in Helena, Montana. My parents’ divorce had gone through a few months earlier, the week I’d turned sixteen, and the judge had ruled that the summer was to be time with my father. After my grandparents’ crowded condo in buggy, polluted Florida, his trailer in the mountains was just what I needed. I felt like I could breathe again and my acne began to clear up. My father, though, had deteriorated. He had grown a black beard, which made his skin look paler. When he spoke, his words were run together or sleepily strung out. I noticed he was drinking real coffee now and forgetting to watch his salt.

“You’re looking good,” I told him my second day there. We were sitting in plaid nylon lawn chairs on his sloping, home-built deck. Between us, on a little metal table, was a family-size bag of barbeque potato chips that we sometimes reached into.

“Baloney,” my father said. “I’m eating worse, sleeping less, drinking more, and feeling shittier every day.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I threw away my life,” my father said. “I hated computers. They bored me stiff. Everyone thinks of computers as clever, but in fact they’re the definition of dumb. They aren’t electronic minds at all. Imagine a person who all he can do is repeat what you tell him, not even twist things. Imagine spending twenty years with him.”

As we ate our snack and watched the sun go down, I wondered if my father had kept up with his strange pastime. All winter in Florida I had scanned the newspapers, particularly the supermarket tabloids, looking for stories with Montana datelines, but no luck. All the tall tales seemed to come from other regions. There was a haunting in a Long Island mansion, sea monsters in the Finger Lakes, crucifix-shaped hailstones in Missouri. A pair of elderly lobstermen in Maine claimed to have watched a group of gray whales spout in unison between a hovering mothership. America was seeing things, but my father appeared to have no part in it.

Then he told me about Howling Johnny and I realized my father had not retired—he had raised his sights.

It was August, hot. We placed the bones and relics in a flour sack, closed the sack with baling twine, then stowed it in the trunk of my father’s rusted Cutlass. The metal fried my finger-tips as I slammed the trunk lid. My father stood off to the side with pen and notepad, giving instructions and checking off our steps. He had on a wrinkled pink polo shirt, dark glasses, and a baseball cap from Popular Mechanics. I sensed that he thought he looked inconspicuous, but to me he looked absurd. Also, profoundly, utterly fulfilled.

“Gasoline,” he said.

“I filled the tank.”

“Once we’re inside Glacier Park,” he said, repeating this point for the third or fourth time, “we’re on our own. They don’t have service stations.”

“That’s why I filled the tank,” I said.

His lack of faith annoyed me. I had been working hard to keep his confidence ever since the night in late July when he had spread a white bedsheet on the deck and carefully set out the Johnny remains and the other gravesite relics. He showed me the bones out of jealously, I think. He had been drinking bourbon during dinner and grilling me about my mother’s boyfriend, a Coast Guard officer named Percy Finn. After ridiculing his name and the concept of the Coast Guard, my father asked me if Percy Finn had ever let me visit his cutter. I said yes and my father’s face changed color. He said, “I’ll bet that was interesting,” and pressed me until I admitted that it had been. Then he rose on wobbly legs and disappeared into his trailer. A few minutes later he came out carrying the bundle.

The remains themselves—an adolescent male skeleton purchased from a defunct museum and some hair my father had saved from his own head—were the least part of the Howling Johnny hoax, which was based, my father said, on an actual unsolved missing-persons case. In 1939, the story went, a six-year-old boy named Johnny Hale, budding musical prodigy and only child of Thomas Earle Hale, a leading San Francisco banker, disappeared from his parents’ lakeside campsite in Glacier National Park. A massive manhunt was launched immediately, but after weeks of intensive search, the reams of divers, bloodhound handlers, and Native American trackers had failed to turn up the slightest clue to the child’s fate. Park officials presumed the boy dead—killed and eaten by bears or wolves—but Thomas Hale rejected the conclusion. Until his death in 1975, Hale senior had offered a standing reward of half a million dollars for information about the lost boy’s whereabouts. The reward created a small but steady stream of Johnny sightings, Johnny lore, and even one or two Johnny imposters, but no satisfying explanation was ever found.

My father intended to close the case. As we headed north on I-15, rolling cool Coke cans across our baking foreheads and listening to a Merle Haggard tape, we carried with us the makings of an American roadside legend. Far from being eaten by wild beasts, Johnny Hale, the world would soon discover, had himself become a beast: a hairy wildboy, maker of crude stone tools and weapons, and yes, because of his musical upbringing, an artist as well—a kind of Stone Age Mozart. Stashed in the rotting, handstitched deer hide rucksack that would be unearthed beside the bones were rustic antler harmonicas, crude flutes, even a tiny lute-like instrument strung with braided elk gut. When my father first showed me this primitive orchestra, he bragged that he’d outdone himself, and I had to agree: Johnny’s instruments were works of genius, implausibly plausible. It was the closest my father had come to his ideal—to create something fantastic which actually might have happened.

We stayed that night in a campground just inside the park’s east entrance. Neither of us slept. Howling Johnny was too much with us and I kept seeing the moon-outlined image of his thrown-back head as he piped strange tunes across high mountain valleys. His motives for choosing this savage, lonesome life would never be fully known, of course, but perhaps a partial explanation lay in the faded newspaper clipping my father had planted in Johnny’s rucksack. The clipping, obtained from an actual old copy of the San Francisco Chronicle, was a review of little Johnny Hale’s first public recital, noting his “somewhat skittish fingering” and “oddly romantic choice of material.” So apparently the six-year-old wonder could not take criticism, and had fled to the rocky moraines of Glacier Park to work out his musical gifts in solitude.

“And you know why it’s perfect?” said my father, turning over in his sleeping bag and going up on one elbow to face me. “The moment this thing gets discovered and reported on, people will know there’s a master out there. It’s better than Piltdown Man.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“People won’t want to explain this thing. It’s magical.”

We folded the tent around 2 a.m. and climbed into the Cutlass and drove for an hour on the moonlit Going to the Sun Road. We parked at a trailhead posted with a sign warning hikers of grizzly bears. We divided the Johnny remains between two knapsacks and walked for an hour straight uphill. I noticed my father getting short of breath and I offered to take his pack for him. I was surprised when he accepted. We climbed another hundred yards or so and he sat down on a rock and put his head down. I shined my flashlight on him. He looked awful, with damp, matted hair.

“Let’s stop,” I said. We’ll do it here.”

 My father shook his head. “It has to be near the snow line. Off the trail more. Also, we need a cliff he could have fallen from. It has to make a story.”

By this time, my father was shivering hard and his color had turned a sickly pink. He wrapped his arms around his chest and eyed me pathetically. His breathing was quick and fluttery, as if his lungs had turned to crinkly paper.

“I’ll do it myself,” I said. “I won’t be long. You sit tight and keep warm, okay? Don’t move.”

I shrugged off my fleece-lined denim jacket and draped it over my father’s shaking shoulders. I asked him if he was all right and he nodded. Then I strapped on both knapsacks, took a breath, and went up the mountains to bury the bones.

Five months later, my father died. The news of his stroke came as no surprise to me. During my last few weeks in Montana, in the lull that followed our trip to Glacier, my father had gone on a binge of strong black coffee, alcohol, and salt. When I’d begged him to take his blood pressure medicine, he’d cursed me like he didn’t even know me and said the pills made him impotent, which had ruined his marriage and ruined his life. His bitterness and fury, long pushed down, flew out in terrible rants and screaming fits, often directed at Percy Finn, who had become an obsession by then. I left for Florida five days earlier than planned, vowing not to return the following summer and sensing that perhaps I wouldn’t have to.

My mother and I did not attend the funeral, which was paid for by my father’s company, a Helena data-collection firm. He had gone back to computers, after all—to the machines that had faithfully supported him. His boss sent us a snapshot of the urn containing my father’s ashes and he offered to send along the urn itself, but I told my mother I didn’t want the thing.

I had a better way to remember my father, a memory that was mine alone, hidden where the world couldn’t touch it.

When my father died, Howling Johnny still had not been uncovered, as I’d taken pains to make sure he never would be. I simply buried him too deep.