The Shark God (22 page)

The screen door of a bungalow swung open, and a white woman emerged, her white dress billowing around her ankles. “Come in! Come in! Your lunch is ready,” she bellowed.

I obeyed, and the door slammed shut behind me. The Adventists had been expecting me: I had radioed before leaving Auki, hoping to track down an Australian reputed to have strong con
nections with the Kwaio. This was not him. This was Geri Gaines, wife of one of the volunteer doctors at the mission hospital. I was transfixed by her. Her face was flushed with the heat. She was tall and broad, and so were her good intentions. We held hands as Geri said grace. Lunch was a hallucination from daytime television. Squeezable bottles of ketchup and processed cheese formed the centerpiece. Geri presented a great mound of Kraft Dinner, which filled the room with an electric orange glow. Then came a plate of chocolate chip cookies. It was heaven.

“We're here for three months—you don't think we're gonna eat yams the whole time, do you?” Geri said, squeezing a glistening slug of cheese onto her plate. “I had our food flown in all the way from El Aye!”

I told Geri I wanted to head into the Kwaio bush. She reached for my wrist and shook her head sadly.

“The pagans,” she said. “Such a shame. Those poor people are so close to the mission, but they reef-yoos to change. They reef-yoos to progress. And do you know why? They are too scared of their
devil-devils
, that's why.” Anyway, it wasn't a good time to go see the pagans, Geri said. Better to stay at the mission. There would be eight hours of worship tomorrow, it being Saturday.

“But why is it a bad time to see the pagans?” I asked.

“Lordy, where do I start?” said Geri. “First, they've got a dead devil priest to deal with up there. Then there's the Italian mess—”

“Italians?”

“They were fools, as far as I could see. They had it coming to them. And, oh look, here's our David.”

David MacLaren looked as though he had been plucked from a Queensland cattle station: all scruffy beard, crow's feet, and sharp blue eyes. He quivered with nervous dingo energy. He glanced at our Kraft Dinner and gave me a knowing wink. Then he closed his eyes and said a whispered grace.

David was my connection. He had been popping in and out of
East Kwaio country for a decade, first to work as chief pathologist at the hospital, then as part of a touring open-heart surgery team, and now to study the place as part of his master's thesis in public health.

The Adventists ran the only proper hospital on Malaita, David said, but they had a problem. They offered medical services for two Solomon dollars (about the price of two coconuts), but the bush Kwaio still could not afford to set foot in the place. Why? Everything about the hospital—its architecture, its procedures, its toilets, its staff—violated Kwaio
kastom
.

Some examples: the hospital was a two-story building, but the ancestors forbade Kwaio men to walk under any structure where women had walked. Men's rooms happened to share the same roof as the maternity ward; this was an outrage, as a Kwaio man should never enter a women's delivery house. The hospital toilets were impressively hygienic, but they were also under that same roof; asking a Kwaio to sleep in such a building was like asking him to sleep inside an outhouse. Then there was the issue of bodily fluids: the Kwaio knew that sink water, which contained human saliva, mingled with toilet water somewhere in the hospital's drains. Fluid from one's mouth could not be mixed with
shit-shit
. No way. If a Kwaio entered such a sacrilegious building, he would insult the ancestors so much that they would withdraw their magic protection: gardens would fail, misfortune would spread through his village, sickness and disease would follow. He would have to sacrifice a dozen or more pigs to placate the dead. A hospital visit could cost a decade of accumulated wealth, not to mention future favors.

David had spent the last three years trying to figure out how to build a hospital wing that the ancestor-worshippers would actually use. He had won the trust and friendship of the pagan chiefs. That's why he could not let me just wander up the mountain. Not now.

“Because of the devil priest,” said Geri.

David smiled the smile of a teenager whose mother had embarrassed him. “A
kastom
priest has died,” he said. “They will be killing pigs up there, putting on a mortuary feast. All my contacts will be mourning. Nobody is allowed to travel in the district. It's a matter of respect. That's one thing.”

“The other?”

“Well, you don't just wander into Kwaio country without the permission of a chief.”

“Like the Italians did,” said Geri.

“Who are these Italians?”

David sighed. The previous month, he said, a party of white men and women had arrived on the mail plane. They said they were doctors and were here to help. They found a guide and headed for the hills. It didn't go well at all. The doctors didn't heal anyone, but they did break all kinds of
tabus
. The worst thing they did was to carry toilet paper into the villages. It was unused, of course, but the unclean association was a screaming affront to the ancestors. The bumbling Italians made it back down to Atoifi, but a mob of angry pagans cut them off en route to the airstrip. The Kwaio wanted compensation. The Italians tried to negotiate. Big mistake. Machetes were drawn. One Italian was sliced pretty badly—he almost lost an arm, said David. Finally, the visitors agreed to patch things up the Kwaio way. They held a compensation ceremony and took the next plane out.

“You have to understand the pagans are incredibly suspicious of outsiders. They still haven't gotten over the 1927 massacre.”

“So what am I going to do?” I asked, simultaneously irritated and vaguely relieved.

“Well, the next plane should come through in four days. You could stay here and talk to our patients,” David said.

“We have worship tomorrow,” said Geri hopefully.

David watched me grimace. “Or you could get out of the dis
trict. Leave the area of mourning, steer clear of anywhere the Italians walked. There is a Christian chief down in Sinalagu who might help you. Peter Laetebo. He worked with Roger Keesing back in the sixties.”

“Sinalagu!” Geri sang out. “The youth group is putting on a worship there tomorrow. You could go with them, 'specially if you paid for their gas.”

I would have retreated to Honiara the next day if there had been a plane out. I felt crushed by the sodden sky, harassed by the mountains that seemed to want to push the entire mission into the sea. It was all wrong, this place, and also my being here. But the plan was set. I would follow the ghost of William Bell into Sinalagu Harbor, find my heathens, and get the hell out.

I left Atoifi at dawn in an aluminum runabout loaded with ten scrubbed Christians and one portable karaoke machine. We pushed through the barrier reef and headed south. The heavy sky had pressed the ripples out of the sea. Six black dolphins leapt in the distance. We skirted a series of ragged limestone cliffs that eventually ruptured, providing a passage into a vast, diamond-shaped lagoon. The boatman deposited the Adventist youths at the north end of the lagoon, where coral grew in the shallows like giant clumps of rotting cauliflower. Then we headed for the southern corner of the harbor, where the mountains were higher and steeper. The boatman pointed to a low bluff. “Mr. Bell,” he said. “That's where they killed him.”

He cut the outboard engine and lifted it from the water. We poled through the shallows toward a cluster of huts on stilts. Gounabusu. I hopped out and sank to my knees in muck. The boatman went home. The villagers ignored me completely until I found Peter Laetebo, the chief. He was an ancient and vaguely muddled fellow. He had wrapped a dirty yellow dishtowel around his waist like a sarong, and his belly trembled above it like a deflated balloon. He took me to someone's hut, where we sat on a
wooden bench and I tried to explain myself to a rapidly expanding jury. One by one, the village men came in, and I handed out my business card, which read “journalist.” The chief smiled and nodded knowingly. On his right sat a burly young man who wore a thick shell money necklace and a Pearl Jam T-shirt; he had bleached his hair blond. Pearl Jam was silent, but I could tell by the way he nodded he was my ally. Things were going quite well, I thought, until the one-eyed man arrived.

He said nothing at first. He just gazed at me with that one angry eye while pus oozed from the other. He wore a bandanna around his head and an army fatigue vest. He slapped his thigh with his machete. It looked sharp. He stroked the hairs on his chin.

“White men are millionaires,” he said in pidgin.

“Pardon?”

“I want to know why you
stap
here.”

The other men fell silent. I explained myself again and threw in a blurb about promoting tourism or something equally beneficial. I watched the one-eyed man's fingers tighten around his machete.

“This is my land. Those gardens up there on the hill belong to
mifala
. We don't need white men to come and steal the stories
blong mifala
. We don't need another Keesing to make himself rich from our culture.”

Keesing? How strange, I thought, as blood rushed to my cheeks. The anthropologist had spent two decades mucking about the bush with the pagans. He didn't get rich, and he was never particularly interested in the Christians down here on the coast. I didn't say any of these things.

The one-eyed man held my business card up with both hands, then slowly ripped it in two. We all watched the pieces flutter to the floor. I thought about William Bell seated at his tax-collecting table, and compulsively I stood up, perhaps shaking just a little. This was a Christian mission village. Christians didn't chop visitors to bits.

“Um,” I said. “Sorry. Um, there must be a mistake. I must have made a mistake.”

“Yes! You sorry! You should have asked before coming here. You no ask.
Yu mas stap insaed long kanu blong yu and go nao.
”

I had decided that looking at the one-eyed man was a bad idea since I could not keep my gaze from shifting over to that right eye socket, where sometimes a tiny bloodshot sliver of eyeball did appear. I looked instead at the floor, wondering why the chief and the others weren't helping me. What felt like hours passed before the one-eyed man finally stomped down the stairs and trudged away across the dirt.

“Everything is fine, mate,” said my ally with the bleached blond hair. He spoke in English with an unmistakable Aussie accent. “I'll take you into the mountains tomorrow. But now, you should come to my house. Right now.”

The chief nodded gravely.

My ally introduced himself as Roni Butala. His house was a tin-and-timber shack on the other side of the village, past the South Seas Evangelical Church. I made myself small on Roni's veranda and accepted a cup of tea from his mother. Roni called together a few cousins, then disappeared. The cousins remained. Two of them carried long bush knives. One had a bow and arrow.

“Maybe you should
stap
inside,” Roni's mother said nervously.

An hour later, Roni returned with the one-eyed man, who had adopted a more diplomatic aspect.

“Everything is fine,” said Roni.

“You are welcome here,” said the one-eyed man, whose name was Samuel. “
Yu savve walkabaot.
”

“Thank you,” I said.

Samuel offered me his hand.

“Come back inside long house,” Roni's mother called to me, urgently now.

I accepted Samuel's hand. His palm was sticky, like wet to
bacco. He shook mine aggressively. He sneered at me, then retreated.

“We will have to give him some money before you leave,” said Roni.

“Roni!” squawked the mother from the veranda. “Oh, Roni! Why did you let
fren blong yu
shake the hand of Samuel? This is bad. Oh, this is bad
tumas
.”

“What is she talking about?” I asked Roni. He just rolled his eyes. But I already knew Samuel's handshake was more than a handshake. There was a coldness I couldn't seem to wipe from my palm.

That night, Peter Laetebo joined Roni and me on the veranda. The chief had put on a button-down business shirt. In the lamplight, I could see his facial tattoos shine beneath his white stubble. They looked like unfinished games of tic-tac-toe. The chief wanted to
storian
. He had been a pagan priest when he met Keesing, the anthropologist, back in the 1960s, he announced.

“But you're a Christian now,” I said.

“
Hem i tru tumas ia
,” the chief said, slapping his knee proudly. “When I was a heathen, life was good, but it was expensive. Every time my
pikinini
got sick, I had to give up money and pigs to the devils…”

“Ancestors,” said Roni under his breath.

“One day
soniboy blong mi
got sick,” said Peter. “Fever, belly-run. I was tired of sacrificing so I brought the boy down to the mission here. The pastor put his hands on
soniboy
and prayed: not long, two, three hours,
nomo
. Then the boy woke up and started to cry. I said, ‘
Disfala God, hem i tru wan!
'”

Peter had moved his family down to Gounabusu and learned to follow the new
tabus
. The South Seas Evangelical Church forbade alcohol, tobacco, and betel nut. It forbade any kind of ancestor tribute. Women had to cover their breasts. Those things were a bother. But Christian life helped the chief to save money: he could keep all his pigs for himself, and he didn't have to spend weeks in
isolation after sacrifices. So Peter the pagan priest was now a church elder.

Peter couldn't talk for long. His second son was now gravely ill, and the pastor hadn't been able to help. Peter would be sitting at the boy's side for the rest of the night.