The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  “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.

  “Kastom? I am wanfala Christian, not wanfala heathen,” he replied. “That stone means nothing to me. But look at this mud! We don’t want any more rain around here. No more rain, do you understand? Don’t you so much as touch that stone!”

  The chief trudged over to Jimmy and yelled in his good ear. Jimmy yelped like a kicked dog. The chief pointed at the mountain and yelled some more. Jimmy leapt in the air and charged up the log trench. We followed. At the edge of the camp, we were intercepted by a distressed-looking Chinese man in gum boots. “You not from Greenpeace? You not hippie?” he said to me. I shook my head.

  “You not taking photos of logging?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “Our security man, he will go with you.”

  We all climbed into a rusted pickup, John, his brother Allen, Jimmy, the security man, and I. Everyone insisted I sit in the front seat, so I did. The truck driver’s name was Foo. He told me he had a wife back in Kuala Lumpur. Every year, he got a month’s vacation and took his wife to a casino hotel in Tenerife. He despised New Georgia. I told Foo a Cantonese phrase I picked up in Hong Kong, something like “Lohk gau si”—It’s raining dogshit. That made him laugh.

  We slid through the muck, past a platoon of young men with chain saws on their shoulders, who looked miserable. Instead of shell money, the men had engine gaskets and chains and sprockets strung around their necks and wrists.

  It wasn’t the missing trees that struck me the most. It was the ground. The red earth had been unbound, freed from its protective weave of roots and bush. It was crumbling, collapsing, sliding all around us; now seeping away like hot lava, now spilling over the roads; filling the gullies like wet cement, overflowing from creek beds, leaving the mountain thin and wasted like the victim of a sorcerer’s life-sucking curse.

  We had driven for fifteen minutes when Jimmy banged on the roof of the cab, and Foo stepped on the brake. Through a hole in the floor near the brake pedal, I saw the tire lock and skid. I remembered another common Cantonese saying: “Sihk yah ng-jouh yah, jouh yah dah-laahn yah”—You consume everything but make nothing, and you make a mess of anything you touch.

  Foo laughed again, sadly this time. “A mess,” he said. “Sure. A real mess.” Then he drove away with the security man.

  The rest of us followed Jimmy up through the slash, which was as dry as kindling and crusted with baked-on mud. The forest, when we reached it, was cool and damp. We bushwhacked toward the ridge crest. The guys swung at the undergrowth with their machetes. I remember the rocket-ship trees and their splayed roots. I remember the soft leaves that left welts where they brushed my ankles. But I can’t remember much else about that forest, because I was trying to keep up with Jimmy, who was charging through the bush, oblivious to our screams for him to slow down. His hoots and squawks echoed through the canopy. Finally, he paused alongside a tremendous, spiraling tree trunk, spray-painted with the letter T in orange. The mark stood for tabu. The loggers could cut down the forest until they reached that mark. Directly below the T was a heap of ruins: a tumbled-down wall, a stone terrace, and the remains of an earthen oven. Most of these rocks were the remains of the city of the Tagitaki, shouted Jimmy above the silence.

  A faint path wound along the ridge crest. We followed it until we reached a roughly polished sandstone slab and a heptagonal pillar, about the height of a lectern. This ruin was John’s favorite. He said the slab was for special occasions, those times when the Tagitaki managed to bring home one of their enemies’ children. When the Tagitaki caught a baby, they would keep him for a while, fatten him up on taro and gnali nuts. After a few months, the giants would get together and play catch with the toddler. That helped soften the meat. Then they would lay the child on that sandstone slab, slice him open, and eat him raw. Nobody seemed to know what the pillar was for.

  My friends in New Georgia loved their baby-eating stories even more than colonial historians did. Everyone had one. They made me wonder if the cannibal-myth doubters had ever bothered to consult Melanesians about their historical revisionism. It was hard to dismiss them when the locals themselves were such adamant believers in the savagery of their ancestors.

  But why did New Georgians treasure their baby-eating stories? The simplest answer would be that the stories lent their tellers a kind of primordial cachet. For John, they were a reminder that his forebears had been kick-ass warriors, and that the only tribe tough enough to chase them were baby-gobbling giants. But I think the horror stories served another function. Just as white men had used cannibal stories as a kind of moral armor to justify their interventions, the Christianized New Georgia
ns had employed them to reassure themselves that the new way was the best way, that they were following a better path than their ancestors. They served to remind the lagoon people of the darkness that lurked within their own souls, the darkness that required vigilance. If the cannibal story is mythical—which is to say that its main function is to hint at truths of the human soul—then its historicity is of secondary importance. The key to mythical truth is not bones and ruins, but belief itself.

  This is the tug-of-war between historical and mythical truth, and it occurs amid tales of horror and magic alike. The stories my great-grandfather brought with him to Melanesia—the miracles and resurrection of Jesus, the almightiness of God, the fires of hell, the glories of everlasting life—these were the shimmering images that had convinced islanders to turn their backs on their ancestors, just as they had convinced our own forebears to relinquish their Nordic gods.

  It’s faith, not veracity, that gives stories their power. And thus charged, stories confer power back on their believers, whether that power is simply the strength of certainty, spiritual clarity, or something more. In Honiara, people assured me I would be in no danger from black magic, even if a sorcerer waved a handful of mana-charged cobwebs in my face, because my disbelief was stronger than kastom magic. But when you fall toward mythical thinking, when you rub up against the rough edges of it long enough, it can enter you like a virus, and the world changes. There is more danger, but there is more possibility. Events present themselves symbolically. They wrap themselves in magic rather than coincidence, and their circumstances assume direction and purpose.

  So faith is a decision, but it can be precipitated by certain conditions. A story, say, about the connection between a mythical snake, a lump of rock, and a storm, is presented. Context, something like a battle between natural goodness and industrial logging, provides a foundation. The landscape might reflect these things: it might be ravaged, or it might seethe with its own fragile power. The air might take on a certain quality, perhaps a kind of pregnant heaviness. There might be an eerie silence. These things might prepare you.

  They might lead you to the readiness I began to feel as I followed one-eared Jimmy up the ridge, through the jungle, past the ruined fortresses of the giants, toward the leaden sky.

  I paused to wring the sweat from my T-shirt, only to realize that Jimmy’s grunts and whoops had ceased, and the forest had gone suddenly silent. The silence wasn’t complete. It was punctured by the whine of chain saws in the distance and occasional squawks from longbills up in the canopy. Nothing moved. The gray sky glowed. The forest waited expectantly. The stillness was crushing. Ready.

  I found Jimmy, John, and Allen in a glade at the top of the ridge. They were crouching near a mound of cut stones. “Nonotongere,” said John, nodding toward a hunk of weather-blackened limestone in the undergrowth.

  For all its notoriety, the snake stone should have been as big as a house. It was not. It was about the size of a medicine ball. From a certain angle, with the shadow beneath its angled jaw, with its angry temples and blunt snout, the stone did look like the head of a snake. A hole the thickness of a broomstick had been carved through its cheeks. The hole ends could have been eyes. I reached out and ran my fingers along its jaw. The rock was warm.

  “Careful! Careful!” sputtered Jimmy.

  “Sorry,” I said, and stood up.

  John looked at me and winked. “Bae-bae yumi checkem olgeta skull,” he said to Jimmy’s good ear, and we tromped to the far side of the clearing where the rocks had been piled into a squarish vault. On top of the vault were several thick slabs, sprinkled with bits of broken shell. Jimmy hacked away at the shrubbery around the vault. John caught my eye again and winked. I got it.

  “I’ll make lunch,” I said.

  I stepped back to the snake head, keeping an eye on Jimmy and his machete. I crouched down. It’s not like I would be risking an earthquake. Nobody would be hurt. I pursed my lips, blew a quick puff of air across the snake’s snout, then jumped to my feet.

  A shriek rose from the far side of the clearing.

  “What’s wrong?” I shouted.

  “We just knocked some bones. Jimmy, he’s worried,” said John. Nobody but me seemed to notice the trembling in the canopy, the gentle rustling of leaves, the faint breeze that whisked through the glade and disappeared into the stillness of the afternoon.

  We ate in the cradle of a rocket tree. Allen cut up some papaya. I opened a can of spaghetti and a packet of shortbread biscuits I had brought from Honiara. Jimmy collected some gnali nuts and hammered them open with a rock. John cut some leaves and spread our food on them. We used the biscuits to scoop up the spaghetti.

  “If the chief is a Christian, why is he so protective of the Nonotongere?” I asked John.

  “Because chief works for the Chinese,” he said. “Suppose we make rain: then the whole operation must shut down, and chief won’t get paid.”

  “No! Hem i becos chief hem i no likem for yumi sick from olgeta devil,” said Jimmy, who was fidgeting nervously again, cocking his good ear toward the vault as though someone were calling to him. “Nogud yumi tochim olgeta bones. Yumi mas go out from disfala place!”

  Jimmy couldn’t see the Nonotongere from where he sat. It lay behind our picnic tree. I excused myself to pee. But I didn’t do that. I snuck behind the tree and knelt down by the snake head. I cupped that warm stone in my hands—gently, tenderly—then I took a deep breath and blew a lungful of spaghetti-scented air into the snake’s eye hole. I took another breath and blew even harder. I blew until I was dizzy, and then, as soon as I could stand, I stumbled back to our picnic. John watched me sit down and gave me a conspiratorial grin. Jimmy was trimming his fingernails with his machete. I reached for a piece of shortbread, then hesitated. My eyes met John’s. We were ready.

  The change came without warning, like a great wave breaking over the glade. It roared through the trees and flattened the brush. Leaves swirled and raced like swallows, then fell like green snowflakes. Tree trunks groaned. Longbills peeled from the highest branches like shingles torn from a roof and flew away, down into the valley. I could see the sky through a break in the ravaged canopy. The overcast was no longer flat. It was not distant. It did not glow. It was purple and heavy. It was collapsing, first in great sagging boils, then in translucent curtains, now in dirty gray stalactites, liquid spears of plunging pressure, all falling with the weight of exhilaration and relief.

  Jimmy got to his feet, began to shout and moan, then dashed toward the stone vault.

  “What is he doing?” I said.

  “He is telling the ancestors he is sori tumas,” said John. “Jimmy thinks he brought the rain. But it wasn’t Jimmy. It was you!” John grinned from ear to ear. It was the smile of a teenage shoplifter, a lagoon Casanova, a first-time car thief.

  “Yumi go nao!” wailed Jimmy as the first drops of rain exploded on his forehead.

  “Yes, we go!” John shouted. “No good the devils find us and follow us home!”

  “We go!” shouted Allen.

  “We go!” shouted I.

  The rain came thick and hard. It exploded on the forest canopy like thousands of firecrackers, then poured through in tiny rivulets. The air vibrated with the impact. Water cascaded from broad leaves and tree trunks and rock walls. It collided with itself, gathered in glorious torrents, and gushed down the trail.

  Drenched, we charged down the ridge, splashing through the runoff, leaping deadfalls and sacrificial stones and lines of panicked black ants. We burst out of the forest into the logging slash. The road was not a road anymore. It was a river. It bubbled like hot chocolate. Trucks stood abandoned. A line of young men trudged toward a hut in the distance. They carried long-blade chain saws on their shoulders and left a trail of rainbow-swirled gas stains in the puddles behind them.

  The rain streamed down my face, and I could not wipe the smile from it. I knew I was beaming like a fool, because John looked at me and burst out laughing himself. Bu
t he didn’t know the truth behind my smile. It wasn’t because we had disobeyed the chief like a couple of rascals. It wasn’t because we had tricked Jimmy. It wasn’t because I had conjured a tempest from the eye of the Nonotongere. (A storm! I had made it rain! Don’t tell me I didn’t!) It wasn’t because, for the first time in weeks, the deadening heat and the fog of lethargy had loosened their grip on me, and I could run and breathe and feel my skin again. It was because, in that moment, I let myself imagine that empire had not stolen all the mana from New Georgia, that for a few hours or days, or perhaps just for those few seconds, magic could halt the crushing engines. The trucks were stuck. The fallers and the drivers were under cover, smoking and making plans to paddle back to their families. Foo was dreaming of Tenerife. The chief of Mbarejo was pacing back and forth in the mud, cursing. And there was mud between my toes.

  If you summon a storm, and your call is reinforced by an idea about the power of a stone or a god or a spirit, and then the storm does fall on you, surely you should honor the moment with faith and not bury it in skepticism. Surely you should wrap it in mythical truth, rather than explain it away. The Nonotongere drew the tempest down from the sky. I would let that be my story. It was a good one to believe, much better than the one with John complaining that it rained every afternoon on New Georgia. So I accepted it, and I was made ready for more.

  18

  Under the Langa Langa Lagoon

  The supernatural power abiding in the powerful living man abides in his ghost after death, with increased vigour and more ease of movement.

  —R. H. CODRINGTON, The Melanesians

  Word moved quickly across the lagoon. By the time I stepped ashore in Seghe, the air agent had heard that John and I had climbed the ridge beyond Mbarajo. He knew we had played with the forbidden Nonotongere. For one thing, the airstrip had been rendered useless for the better part of a day by the deluge. He was terse with me, but he did sell me a ticket, and I flew back to Honiara with a planeload of loggers and their bodyguards.