The Many Lies of Shannon Jones: A True Story

My cousin Shannon was the world’s greatest storyteller. Which is to say she was a phenomenal liar.

In fact, my cousin was not only was a brilliant liar, but she told so many lies that my brother and I used to joke that we should assemble and publish a collection of her lies and title the book, “The Many Lies of Shannon Jones: a true story”*. At times I did get fed up with my cousin’s incessant lying, but at other times I found her fabrications enthralling. The key was that I had to recognize that she was lying. When I knew she was lying, I could sit at her feet and listen to her spin a tale of lies with utter fascination, asking her to elaborate on key story points and taking delight either in her squirming to satisfactorily answer my questions or, just as often, in her magnificent ability to produce sensible and realistic details on the fly and out of thin air.

Of course, a natural side effect of her penchant for make believe is that I usually didn’t believe a word that came out of her mouth. Whenever she started telling me stories—even if it was just a summary of a trip to the grocery store with her mother—I assumed she was talking crap. Sometimes that crap was interesting and I’d play along, but other times I’d tell her to shut up because I’d had enough of her nonsense.

But Shannon wasn’t the only one with a fatal flaw. I was a sucker for adventure, even make-believe adventure. I was the queen of suspending disbelief, especially if it was to lead to a day of marauding about or otherwise making a nuisance of myself. One day I let a neighborhood girl convince me that I was being chased by invisible zombies and that the only way to escape them was by climbing a tree, because evidently zombies are either afraid of heights or simply unable to scale trees (Presumably on account of being undead. I imagine undead limbs are not particularly nimble or limber.) . Unfortunately for me, although I discovered I was perfectly able to climb up a tree (something I had heretofore never attempted) I could not for the life of me muster the courage to climb back down the tree. (I suddenly harbored most tender feelings for poor Tigger in The House on Pooh Corner wherein he found himself in a similar predicament.) But eventually I confessed to myself that I wouldn’t be able to hang in the tree forever, so I wrapped my skinny legs around the meager trunk and did the unthinkable—I slid down the tree. I cut up the insides of my thighs something terrible. I still have some of the resulting scars to this day.

The pair of us were a deadly combination. With Shannon’s ability to wave a wondrous tapestry of deception and my utter willingness to believe anything if it led me into danger and mishap, we often found ourselves in the most interesting situations.

So when my cousin handed me a shovel and told me we were going to dig up Tony’s treasure, I thought, “What the hell? Could be as good a way as any to spend the day.”

My brother and I lived in California, and we spent summers with our grandparents in a little city just outside Cleveland, Ohio. My cousin Shannon, who was a year old than me, lived next door. Her mother worked, so Shannon stayed with my grandmother during the day. The three of us engaged in all sorts of mischief. We had to be covert in many of our missions, as our grandmother had a very discerning eye and would often spy on us from her kitchen window. (We called it spying; she called it checking up on us.) So when we were up to no good, we had to be creative about how we handled it.

I took the shovel in my hand and glanced at the kitchen window. Grandma was nowhere to be seen. “What’s Tony’s treasure?” I asked.

“My mom told me about him,” Shannon said. “He was an old man that used to live in a house right here where we’re standing when our moms were little. He had a tiny little shack and my mom says he buried a treasure here before he died and our moms were supposed to dig it up. But I guess they never did, so it’s probably still buried here. And if we’ve got nothing better to do, we can dig it up.”

Now, I knew better than to believe this story. I’d heard a billion stories from my mother’s childhood and none of them included a shack in the middle of her yard inhabited by some old man named Tony. And even if that were true, which it surely wasn’t, there was no way he buried some treasure and told my mom and aunts to dig it up after he died. And even if he had, which he indubitably had not, it was inconceivable that nobody ever dug up said treasure, even just out of sheer curiosity. The holes in her story were glaring, but far be it from me to say no to adventure.

“What are we going to do about Grandma?” I asked. “If she catches us digging a big hole in the yard—”

“Oh, that’s not the problem,” Shannon assured me. “The problem is that we’ll have to dig lots of holes in the yard, not just one. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know exactly where Tony’s treasure is. I’m not even exactly sure where the house was. But, it’s gotta be here somewhere so we’ll just have to dig around until we find it.”

What remained unsaid was obvious: the lot in question was over an acre; it was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. But neither of us bothered to voice that concern.

I dropped down into a deep crouch and rocked back and forth on my heels. It was my best thinking position. “So how are we going to hide these holes from Grandma?”

My little brother, who mostly went unnoticed between me and Shannon owing to both his being a boy and being three years younger than us, dropped down next to me. “We could build a fort,” he said in his quiet, little boy voice.

“A fort? What do you mean?” Shannon joined us gingerly on the ground. She was wearing a new pair of pink pants and was afraid of getting dirty.

My brother drew in his breath, glancing from me to our cousin. I could see that he was afraid of speaking up, because if his idea turned out to be a stupid one we’d make fun of him and then punish him by ignoring him for the rest of the day. In retrospect, the poor little guy had it rough. I’ve never completely forgiven myself for how we treated him.

“If we build a fort and then dig the hole inside the fort, no one will ever know it’s there. And if we don’t find the treasure, we can fill the holes back in, move the fort, and try again. I don’t think Grandma will notice. She never comes inside our forts.”

He was right about that. For all that our grandmother loved to spy on us, she wasn’t much for invading our privacy and she took no real interest in what we were playing at as long as we were safe and weren’t messing up her yard.

I patted my brother on the back. “Carleton, that’s an excellent idea.” My brother gave a curt little nod as if to say, “I already know that,” but he accepted my praise for what it was worth. The three of us stood up and began building our fort. It took the better part of an afternoon, but once it was built, we were in a perfect position to start digging for Tony’s treasure.

We dug for the treasure for three days before I finally called my cousin’s bluff. “We’re never going to find any treasure anyway,” I said, throwing the shovel on the ground, “because there isn’t any treasure to find. I’m bored of this game; let’s play something else.”

But Shannon was not so easily dissuaded. “It’s got to be here,” she said. “My mom said it was here. And nobody ever dug it up. We have to find the treasure. Think how much money could be there. Think how many Garbage Pail Kids we could buy with the money if we find it! We can’t give up!”

“Shannon, shut up. It was fun for a while but now I’m sick of digging for fake treasure. Let’s go play Starships on our bikes or something.”

But my cousin was getting angry. “I’m NOT LYING!” she shouted. “Tony did bury a treasure here and I want to find it! But I can’t do it alone! Why won’t you believe me? AMBER!”

But by then she was screaming at my back as I had already walked away with my brother in tow. And as far as I can remember, that was the end of our search for Tony’s treasure. Shannon never mentioned it again.

**

Fast forward twenty or so years.

My mother was just here for Christmas, visiting me from Los Angeles. I only get to see my mom once a year, so I had saved up a series of questions about my childhood that I wanted to ask her about, but which I had never wanted to ask her on the phone. (Such as why we lived in a Hyatt hotel for 6 months when I was in junior high. “Why didn’t we just rent an apartment?” I asked her. She shrugged. “There weren’t any apartments downtown and we wanted to be close to he office. We sold the house before we bought a new one, so we just stayed in a hotel. We didn’t’ realize how long it would take.” “That’s it? There’s no other story behind it than that?” “No. That’s it.” I was utterly disappointed.)

Anyway, one of the questions I wanted to ask her was about Tony. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure how to broach the question, as not only was I not sure such a person existed, I couldn’t remember his name or anything about him. In fact, I didn’t’ even remember the above story until after this conversation. I just remember vague reference Shannon had made in our childhood about some ghost that lived in a shack.

“Mom, was there ever a house between your house when you were growing up and the house next door? I mean, the house that was Aunt Lisa’s when I was little. Was there ever a house between your house and that house? With a guy that lived in it named…Sal…. or Moe…?”

My mom nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes. There was a tiny little shack in between the two properties and an old man named Tony lived there.”

“Tony!” I shouted. “That’s it! So it’s true? An old man named Tony lived there?”

“Oh sure,” my mom said. “Tony was an Italian immigrant, and he was pretty poor, but he loved me to death. He called me Little Girl. When he came from work, he’d call to me, ‘Little Girl! Come here, I got you a present!’ And he’d give me some little toy or piece of candy—nothing big, but he always had something for me. See, I was always nice to Tony, and other kids were nasty to him—throwing things in his yard or making fun of his goats. Tony kept goats in the yard, and they stank, and the kids would torture them. But I never did anything like that, so Tony liked me.

“We saw old Tony every day. He came home from work carrying a bottle whisky in a paper bag. He’d stop by the house and ask Daddy if he wanted a swig, but Daddy’d always say, ‘No, thank you, Tony’ because Tony’d already put his mouth on it. One day, Tony figured out why Daddy would never share his whisky, so after that, old Tony would bring the bottle to Daddy unopened. And then Daddy would take a swig. That made old Tony very happy.

“Well, one day, we didn’t see Tony. We didn’t see Tony for three days, and we knew something was wrong. So Mom called the ambulance and they found Tony in the house, dying from pneumonia. They took him to the hospital, but before they loaded him into the ambulance he summoned me over to him and said, ‘Little girl, listen to me. You see that lightpost I got in my yard? Under that lightpost I buried something for you. I’ve been saving it, and I got no one else in the world to leave it to, and I want you to have it. When I die, I want you to dig up that treasure. It’s for you.’

“Old Tony died in the hospital. And do you know that I never did dig up that treasure? They bulldozed his house down and buried what was left. So I just never looked.”

I stared at my mother in disbelief. “You mean that’s true? Tony’s treasure is real?”

My mom laughed. “I don’t know if it’s true, as in truly there, but that’s the true story, yes.”

And that’s when I remembered the days my brother and cousin and I had tried, unsuccessfully, to dig up Tony’s treasure.

“Sometimes I think about going back out there with a metal detector and seeing what I can find,” my mother said wistfully. “But I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a nice story.” She giggled and seemed to dismiss the thought.

It is a nice story, indeed. And it makes me wonder how many other nice stories I dismissed as my cousin’s overactive imagination.

*Not her actual last name, of course.

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