The Hoaxer

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