The Shark God (25 page)

“Loggers spoiling everything,” said one unhappy onlooker who introduced himself as Benjamin. There was a time, he said, when he thought he could make a living from ecotourism—in fact plenty of people in the lagoon had the same idea after the World Wide
Fund for Nature told them how special the place was back in the nineties. The United Nations had been on the verge of declaring Marovo a World Heritage Site. People constructed bungalows with stoves and raised beds for tourists. Benjamin had opened his own lodge over on Vangunu. But then the tension came, and the government withered, and the tourists disappeared, and the Malaysian Chinese showed up with their suitcases of money.

One by one, the lagoon's chiefs had been selling their forests in return for cash and tin roofing and outboard motors, and the red scars had crept up the hillsides, and the guts of the forest seeped into the lagoon like blood, and the coral choked and turned white in the silty half-light, and fishnets began to come up empty.

Sometimes people didn't want their chiefs to sell off the forests. They burned logging trucks and stole chain saws. Back in the nineties, islanders had tried to work with groups like Greenpeace to start village-based “ecoforestry” ventures, but the foreign loggers had guns, guards, and friends in high places. At least one eco-activist got his neck broken. Onetime prime minister Bartholomew Ulufa'alu tried to clamp down on corruption and unsustainable forestry in the nineties, but all that ended when the Malaita Eagle Force arrived on his doorstep with machine guns. Now things were back to normal. “The loggers' work is even easier now that the government is broke,” said Benjamin. “They bribe the government agents and the chiefs, then cut as fast as they can.”

New Georgia's wealth, its
mana
, was being sucked away and delivered raw to mills in Malaysia and Japan. Meanwhile, Benjamin's eco-lodge was empty, so he had started a canteen beside the airstrip, where he sold crackers and warm beer to the loggers.

A woman from the village came to warn me about John Palmer. She said he was the sort of boy I should avoid. He was a rubbish boy. He ran with the rebels from across the water in Bougainville. And worse. “What kind of worse?” I asked. “Just worse,” she said, staring at the dirt, then stomped off without another word.

John returned after dark with the last two jugs of gas in Seghe. We jumped in his
kanu
(another flimsy fiberglass runabout) and headed west to Nono Lagoon. The stars were out, but their light was nothing compared to the halo of phosphorescent sparks that flowed around the bow. Our wake glowed behind us like the tail of a comet. There were other lights, too: yellow nebulae, waving and pulsing under the surface of the lagoon.

“Divers,” said John. “Collecting
bêche-de-mer.
”

Sometimes John would ease the throttle and shine his light into the clear water, and then it was as though the belly of the lagoon had been split open and its entrails had floated up in great bubbles, stopping just short of the surface. Coral. Thousands and thousands of pounds of pale green and purple coral. Within the folds I could see the
bêche-de-mer
, the mottled sea slugs that had excited Chinese palates and lured traders to these waters for two centuries. Some were as big as footballs.

Islands drifted past like shadows on shadows. Then a violent constellation of incandescent orange emerged from behind a curtain of palms. It was a ship, anchored in the middle of the lagoon. It must have been fifty times bigger than the
Tomoko
. Floodlights shone down from two steel cranes. The lights illuminated a stack of raw logs on the deck below. The cranes jerked and twisted frantically, like great metallic birds arranging a nest of sticks.

We rounded a point, and the curtain of islands closed again. We steered toward a single spark of light, which grew into the warm glow of an oil lamp sitting on the porch rail of a cottage. We tied up to a heap of rocks and were greeted by six shirtless young men. They all wore dreadlocks, and they all smoked long cigarettes rolled from magazine paper. John introduced them as his
brothas
, which didn't tell me much because that might mean “brother” or “cousin” or “uncle,” or some more distant relative. These
brothas
were Sam, Laury, Oswold, Allen-Chide, Namokene, and Ray. The island was called Mbatumbosi, but John preferred to call it Bad
Boss, because that name made it seem tougher. It did feel a bit like a gang hideout at first. The brothers smoked and wrestled and lay about in hammocks. There were no women, no sisters, no scolding parents.

“We are alone,” said Allen, as he brought our dinner—a pot of plain rice—to a boil on a gas stove on the porch.

“We are free,” said Ray.

“We are raiders,” said John.

“Raiders,” I said encouragingly, “like your ancestors?”

“No, mon. Raiders blong luv. Olsem Casanova!”

John explained the modern art of raiding. The brothers would take their
kanu
over to the hamlets that dotted the edges of their lagoon, and they would whisper beneath the young women's windows: “Come out, come out and play.” And the girls did crawl out their windows and disappear with the brothers into the shadows. The Methodist village of Nazareth made for poor hunting, but the girls on Mbarejo, which was Seventh-day Adventist, were always eager.

“So you are creepers,” I said, recalling the men who had harassed Sabina back on Vanua Lava.

“Yes!” said Allen.

“No!” said John. “The girlies, they come to us. They tell their daddies that they are going fishing on the reef. Then they paddle straight to Bad Boss.”

Ray said that it was the marble trick that attracted the girls more than anything. The boys had learned the trick from Japanese fishermen. John had one marble. Ray had two. What you did, explained John, was smash a glass mug and file down a small piece of the handle until it was perfectly round and smooth. Next you took an old toothbrush and filed the end of it to a sharp point. Then you got your brother to pull out a pinch of skin on the shaft of your penis, so you could poke a hole through the skin with the sharp end of the toothbrush. You used the toothbrush to push the marble into
the hole. In with the marble, out with the toothbrush, a splash of Dettol disinfectant, and voilà, you had transformed your penis into a sexual novelty. John unzipped his fly and, squirming with pride, exposed just enough of his penis to prove they weren't lying. There was indeed a roundish lump just under the skin.

“
Lookim
,” Ray said as John pushed the lump with his finger, “
hem roll all-abaot!
”

Then we all bowed our heads, and Ray said grace beneath John's framed portrait of Princess Diana.

The brothers may have been raiders. They may have been vagabonds. They may have been naughty. But they were not living alone on Bad Boss by choice. John's parents lived in Honiara and so had he, before the tension.

The problem, he said, was the color of his skin. John was tall and lanky, like his great-grandfather, one of the lagoon's first white traders. But John's skin wasn't white or black or even a Guadalcanal shade of peat brown. So the Guadalcanal militants wouldn't believe John shared their blood. They chased him and beat him. Then, when the Malaita Eagles took their revenge in Honiara, John got a second round of beatings. That's why he was hiding out on Bad Boss. Not because his father had caught him hanging out with Bougainvillean exiles. Not because he was in hot water for hiring a car and helping his friends in the Bougainville Revolutionary Army round up a trunkful of machine guns. No, said John, he was a refugee. It had been three years since he had sat in a car or tasted chocolate.

We passed days languidly on the lagoon. We paddled through the estuary of the Choe River looking for crocodiles, but there were none to see. We took John's boat out through a gap in the barrier islands to spear minnows for lunch. We climbed among the limestone cliffs on the barrier islands. The rock was an amalgam of petrified coral and giant clamshell, and impossible to walk on with bare feet. We found the first skull under a cracked slab. It was sur
rounded by fractured bones, doughnut-sized rings of carved rock and bits of shattered clamshell jewelry. I picked up the skull. It was warm. A spider skittered along its jaw. Startled, I let the skull slip from my hands. It struck the ground and lost a tooth.

“No problem,” John said. “This is not one of my grandfathers. This is someone my grandfathers killed, probably some weak
fala
from Roviana.”

Back on Bad Boss, John led me to three skulls tucked into a shady ravine behind his house. He picked up one and lovingly rubbed the mildew from its forehead. Its eye sockets were cracked and imploring. This, said John, was one of his great-grandmother's people. Those folks were tough, but apparently not tough enough. They had migrated west to Bad Boss to escape the marauding tribes of Roviana Lagoon. Then they were chased away again.

“So you come from a long line of refugees,” I teased John over dinner.

He assured me that his ancestors had killed many people. They had raided villages from Roviana all the way to Isabel. And besides, the Tagitaki were no ordinary enemies. They were giants who wielded clubs so heavy it took six ordinary men to lift them. That's why the ancestors fled. The Tagitaki had once lived on the mountain ridge across the lagoon from Mbarejo. That ridge was
tabu
now, said John.

“Because of the ghosts of the Tagitaki?”

“Ha! Of course not.”

“Then why?”

“Because of the Nonotongere.”

I had heard that name before.

Once upon a time, long before men hunted for heads, said John, a giant serpent had prowled the lagoons. The snake was thicker than a sow and as long as the airstrip at Seghe. One day, the snake fought with a giant lizard. It didn't go well for the snake. The lizard ripped it to pieces. Parts of the snake's body now
littered the foothills of New Georgia, but its head lay on the crest of the ridge where the giant headhunters once lived. That was the Nonotongere. It had retained all the giant snake's
mana
. If you disturbed the snake head, shouted at it, or even so much as blew on it, the devil inside it would answer you with a meteorological hissy fit. It would bring wind, rain, and thunder.

“Nonotongere! Didn't the air agent in Seghe tell us to stay away from it?” I said.

“Maybe,” John said and smiled mischievously. “Would you like to go say hello to it?”

John was not one for following rules. He told me he was not afraid of the devil stone. Sometimes he hiked up the ridge and blew on it, just for the sheer joy of watching rain sweep across the lagoon below, knowing that the drizzle and cool breeze would enliven the young women. He imagined all those damp T-shirts clinging to all those young breasts.

“Mmmm, yes, Nonotongere,
hem gud tumas
,” said John, closing his eyes, drawing deeply on his cigarette.

Another magic stone. Melanesians were like my great-grandfather: they waxed as mystically about their
mana
as Henry Montgomery had about the Holy Spirit. But good luck if you wanted proof from them. I did not bother to pester John for a demonstration of the Nonotongere's power. I was tired of pushing, testing, failing. But that night in my dreams, my mosquito netting was transformed into the glowing miracle cloud from Henry's Irish garden. There were the ghosts of my ancestors again, moving through the rosebushes, which had grown into frangipani and palm. There was the old stone church, the light of the visitation, and the old man collapsed beneath it, sobbing in gratitude, embracing the floor, whose speckled jade tiles were like the scales on the back of a great, sleeping serpent.

John lifted my mosquito net and shook me awake before dawn. He whispered in my ear: “
Day blong Nonotongere!
”

Under an overcast sky, John, Allen, and I motored over to Mbarejo to pick up Jimmy, a jittery, distracted fellow with one functioning ear. We needed Jimmy because he was on good terms with the chief of Mbarejo, who owned the mountain where the Nonotongere waited. We stopped at a waterside canteen and bought supplies for the expedition: three sticks of tobacco and a pad of notepaper for rolling. Then we headed for New Georgia.

There was a logging camp in the bay across from Mbarejo. The camp sat in the middle of a dismaying smear of red-brown mud. It looked as though the hillside had caught some necrifying skin disease, and its flesh had rotted right down to the muscle. Trucks roared out of the forest one by one, but the mud near the lagoon was so viscous they had to dump their logs on the top of the hill. Bulldozers dragged the logs through a deepening trench of slick clay down to a bark-strewn pier. A gang of kids slipped in and out of the trench, cheering each passing log.

The chief of Mbarejo had given a Malaysian company permission to log the mountain. John wasn't sure how much the loggers paid the chief, but the old man had been handing out canoe engines, chain saws, and other bits of cargo to his
wantoks
for the past year. John had managed to score some tin roofing. He said he felt slightly guilty; he knew the loggers were spoiling the lagoon, but it was nice to have a tin roof on his house. And anyway, what choice was there? Everyone knew the Malaysians had paid the government and would get the logs whether the lagoon people wanted to sell them or not.

We tied up to a rock near the pier and found the chief up to his fat ankles in mud. John negotiated. Jimmy gazed at the sky, which was thick and disapproving, and cooed at it.

“Fine, fine. I give you permission to see our
kastom
sites,” the chief bellowed over the roar of the bulldozer. But don't you disturb that devil stone. Don't you dare!”

“I promise I will respect your
kastom
,” I said to the chief.