The day was fading. We pulled up to a muddy beach. There were a few huts among the mangroves, but this settlement could hardly be called an island. Most of the huts stood on stilts, and the high-water mark showed as a filmy ring around their ankles. Unfinished rock walls, foundations, and pathways stood just barely above the patchwork of sand and mud. Philip led me across the island, handing out cigarettes as he went. Crabs skittered out of our path like rats into sandy burrows.
I spotted the shark boss sitting in the shadows of an open cookhouse. I knew it was him, even before I got close enough to see his eyes. And it wasn’t just because he had Veronica’s frizzy white-blond hair. He glowed. His leathered skin was translucent, as though the light of the fading sky were shining right through the gridwork of tattoos on his face. He wore a broad smile. I remember his eyes were as blue as those of my ancestors. (But Melanesians have eyes the color of burned almond—how could his have been blue?) He was surrounded by children. A wooden tray on the bench beside him contained hundreds of rough red discs. He was carving shell money.
“I knew you were coming,” said the shark boss, whose name was Selastine. “Last night I saw you in my dreams.”
I was encouraged.
“Yes, I saw you sleeping in Auki,” he continued.
“We slept in Honiara last night,” I said.
He paid no attention. “I know why you are here, and I will help you. For how many weeks will you stay?” he said.
“Weeks?”
“You have come for the shark, no?”
“Yes, that’s it. For the shark. But I have to leave in three days.”
Selastine looked at Philip and chuckled. “It takes many days, many pigs, to call the shark to shore,” he said. “You must buy pigs. We must sacrifice. You must stay for weeks. Months.”
“But Philip said…”
And then I stopped. Philip was already tucking into a dish of Selastine’s fish and taro, refusing to look up and acknowledge my glare. The bastard had duped me. His promise that four days was enough to catch a bit of shark magic was a big, fat lie. He had simply wanted to fly in an airplane. He had wanted a vacation. He had wanted to sponge off his in-laws. That’s why we were here. I imagined sharks tearing into his bulging stomach.
“I must leave in three days,” I said, quietly, and then mumbled something pathetic about Bishop Patteson and Nukapu, about having to catch the boat to Santa Cruz.
“No worries. We can still storian,” said Selastine, looking at me sympathetically.
I felt dumb with disappointment and anger. I wanted to thrash Philip, or at least to humiliate him in front of his in-laws. But mostly I wanted to cry. My frustration was deep and wide. It was about more than Philip’s deception, more than tricks with sharks. It pulsed through me. It was fueled by the readiness that had come to me during the tempest on New Georgia, but it was bigger than that. It stretched across oceans, years, generations. It was a longing for something just out of reach. It was a story wanting an ending.
“I should just leave. I should leave right now,” I said.
“No kanu long naet,” muttered Philip through a mouthful of mashed taro.
“You stay,” said Selastine softly. “We can fish out on the reef. We can dive.”
Evening settled on the lagoon and the village. A half-moon crept up through the mangroves. I pulled out the food I had brought and piled it on the bench. Instant noodles, bread, peanut butter, and a bag of candies. Selastine handed out the candies to his grandchildren, of which he had dozens. His daughter set a pot of water to boil on the fire. She served us noodles topped with peanut butter.
I didn’t speak. Selastine began his tale. I only jotted it down later, when I realized that the story was part of his gift to me. I may not have all the details just right. But the truth of myth isn’t in the details.
Once upon a time, a young woman of Lalana Point got bubbly, which is to say pregnant. She was unmistakably bubbly, and there was no sign of any father, and her shame was great, so the woman left her village and traveled around the lagoon. When the time finally came to give birth, she settled in Binafafo, where she had twin boys. The first of these twins was not a boy but a shark, so the woman filled a giant clamshell with water and slipped the shark-boy into it. Her second child was a regular boy.
When the brothers were old enough, the woman let them play together in the shallows of the lagoon. She would throw sticks into the water, and the boys would fight over them. The shark-boy grew. So did the man-boy. So did the sticks their mother threw for them. One day, when the brothers were fighting over a stick, the shark-boy bit the man-boy’s hand right off. The man-boy swam to shore and bled to death. His mother was angry and bereaved. She told the shark-boy, whose name was now Bolai, that the only way to atone for his terrible deed was to swim into exile over on Guadalcanal.
Bolai did as his mother told him. He swam west across the strait, and when he reached Guadalcanal, he immediately gobbled up three boys. That was at Bobosa River. The people at Bobosa were understandably cross, so Bolai swam up the coast to Logu. He ate some people there, too, and the Logu people vowed to kill him, so Bolai swam on to Simui, where he ate a few more children. The Simui people built a barricade of trees and sticks to trap Bolai in their lagoon. When he tried to swim through it, his leathery skin was shredded by the sharp sticks. The people caught Bolai and carved him up. Now it was his turn to be eaten. They gave his head to an old woman, who built a fire in order to smoke-cure it. But just as the fire crackled to life, the woman noticed that tears were falling from the shark’s eyes. She took pity on the poor shark head, especially when it told her its sad story.
“Don’t cry for me, old woman,” Bolai said. “Just go and gather the rest of my bones from the village. Bring them back to me. Then you go up into the bush and watch what happens down here tomorrow morning.” The woman obeyed, and sure enough the next morning, a giant wave rose up and swallowed the village of Simui. Bolai pulled together his bones and created a new body for himself. It was huge, and as black as cooking charcoal. Bolai swam all the way back to Langa Langa, where he told his mother that he had made amends for killing his brother. She was pleased. She told Bolai to stay in the lagoon forever, and to be a good boy and cause no more harm to his own people.
“And that,” said Selastine, “is why no one has ever been eaten by a shark in Langa Langa. Bolai is in control of the whole lagoon.”
“And Selastine, he is the one who knows the shark. He is the shark boss,” said a voice from the shadows. I realized the entire village had gathered around us.
“Yes,” said Selastine. “The power of the shark stops inside me. I can use him. I call him to help me dive in the salt water. I can dive to fifteen fathoms. He gives me air. I can stay under the salt water for ten minutes!”
Selastine had a roomful of corroded treasure he had pulled from the wreckage of sunken ships near a reef far off the coast. Nobody else could get at the ships because of the sharks that guarded them.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“No, no. Bolai protects me. He swims around me, guides me. He likes to rub his belly against mine. He is bigger than all the other sharks. Longer than this house.”
The shack was as long as a limousine.
“Why you?” I asked Selastine.
“Because the shark’s mummy was my ancestor. Only I know Bolai’s secrets. Only I know how to sacrifice to him properly. And I pray to him, too.”
“Where?” I said, thinking there might be a shrine.
“What do you mean, where? I pray in the cathedral. The Catholic church.”
“I can’t imagine your priest is happy about that.”
“He doesn’t mind. He knows the shark is not a devil. He knows he is my ancestor and that he gives me good power.”
By now the women had disappeared. The old folks were receding into the blue-gray half-light beyond our oil lamp. Their cigarettes flickered like stars on the horizon. Philip had long fallen asleep, his jowly face coll
apsing into his chest. I was not so angry anymore.
A few teenage boys still lingered. They clambered over the half wall of the cookhouse and whispered. Selastine turned to me and spoke with the gentle voice of a holy man: “Yu savve swim long solwota?”
We took a couple of the boys and pushed Selastine’s canoe into the lagoon. The boat consisted of three mighty planks pegged together a long time ago. There was room for twenty people in among the fishnets and sloshing fish-gut water.
The lagoon was still except for the dip and slice of our paddles. The half-moon illuminated the thin veil of clouds that had spread itself across the entire dome of the sky. The hills of Malaita were the color of licorice. The lagoon flashed with amoeba-shaped patches of reflected light, a glimmer here, an urgent flutter there. Hot white sparks erupted from each paddle stroke.
We glided to a halt. The water became like the sky. The stillness of the night was broken only by distant percussion. It began as a crude thumping, like the sound that grouse make in the Canadian bush. But the thumping grew and was joined by more thuds and thunks. It became a kind of melody, rising and twisting, flowing across the water from some distant hamlet. I recognized it as the sound of a pipe drum band, of boys striking bamboo tubes with the soles of their rubber flip-flops, as they had after the bishop of Malaita’s cathedral service.
Selastine stripped to his underwear and pulled on a pair of goggles, the kind you could buy for a couple of dollars in the Chinese stores back in Honiara. His white hair shone like a halo.
“Wait,” I said. “Why did Bolai have to go and eat all those people on Guadalcanal?”
The boys giggled.
“Because his mother told him to,” said Selastine.
“Why the hell would she do that?”
“To make better the death of his brother.”
“I don’t understand. How could that help?”
“This is Malaitan kastom,” he said. “If you want to avenge a death, you don’t go and kill another person in your village. You have to go to another place to do it.”
“But the shark-boy was the one who killed in the first place!”
“It doesn’t matter who killed. What kastom requires is a life to avenge a life. If you killed my brother, for example, I would not need to come back and kill you. Anyone’s life would do. And I wouldn’t have to do the killing myself. I would pay someone to do it.”
“Like a ramo?”
“Yes, that’s it. Bolai was our first ramo. This is kastom.”
It didn’t seem much different from the cycle of payback that had exploded during the tension and that was still crippling the plains around Honiara. Payback was tradition. It was kastom.
Selastine picked up his speargun and pointed his flashlight into the water. There was nothing to see. He looked at me.
“You come now!” he shouted, then leapt into the water, disappearing in a cloud of bubbles and phosphorescent sparks.
“Yu garem glass-blong-diver. Yu swim. Hem fun!” said one of the boys.
I pulled on my mask and crawled over the gunwale. The water was warm. I poked my head beneath the surface and gazed down into the abyss, where there was nothing. I pulled myself close to the canoe and imagined bad things.
The calm was broken suddenly by the leap and crash of something big.
“Long-fish. Hunting,” said a boy. “You go! You go!”
I imagined myself as seen from below: a soft bundle of exposed flesh. I flattened myself against the canoe, wrapped my legs around the hull. All this talk of indiscriminate revenge killing had filled me with a nauseating sense of vulnerability.
Another explosion of water, this time near the bow of the canoe. It was Selastine. He was like a breaching whale. He gasped and sucked at the air. “Gudfala moon! Gudfala night! Come now. Follow my light,” he said. And then he took a long heave and slipped away again, leaving an expanding circle of silver ripples in his place. I saw the flashlight beam across the hull of the canoe, turn toward the deep, and then descend until it was engulfed by a silty mist.
One of the boys pushed down on my head with his paddle blade. He hammered on my knuckles, making it somewhat less comfortable to cling onto the boat. The boys thought I was afraid. Of course I was afraid! I was swimming with the bloody lord of the sharks. But the humiliation made me let go.
I took a breath, pushed off from the canoe, and reached into the void with both hands. The effect was mesmerizing. Every movement, each handstroke, was followed by a momentary burst of blue-green light, as though I had released a handful of fireflies. I circled beneath the canoe, which, with its paddles pointing out, resembled a great black dragonfly hanging in the sky. I waved and curled my hands, kicked above me until my body was surrounded by a whorl of stardust, like the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia. I was laughing when I surfaced, and so were the boys, who knew what I had seen.
And I could stop here. I could let this be enough. But there should be more to this story, shouldn’t there?
I do remember there was more.
I realized Selastine was still underwater. How long had it been? One minute? Five?
“Selastine,” I said, and the boys just laughed. “Hem go walkabaot. Hem fising.” I peered down and saw nothing. I took a great breath and dove, kicking at the sky, pulling at the deep, peering through the blackness.
There is a panic that comes when you hold your breath for too long. It’s about oxygen, of course, and the thought of all that water pouring into your lungs. I saw the faintest glow, a foggy circle of light beneath me, and I struggled against my buoyancy, but the panic turned me around. I kicked for the surface and emerged far off the bow. The boys paddled toward me. I grabbed the gunwale and took ten deep breaths, then dove again. I exhaled slowly this time. I ignored the phosphorescent sparks that peeled from my fingers. I saw the light and kicked hard toward it. It grew into a jaundiced whorl of seaweed and sand. Perhaps there were coral rocks. I couldn’t tell. A great, obscuring dust storm of silt was sweeping through the lagoon. I kicked farther and saw that the light was coming from a man, from Selastine. He was sitting cross-legged on the ocean floor, not moving, just sitting there. Occasionally, a bubble escaped from his mouth and floated like a nervous jellyfish up toward the steel glare of the night sky. The panic returned, obscuring my vision, screaming for me to surface, even as I struggled to make sense of the scene, which was somehow right and not right at the same time, and confusing, because I knew I should have been scared, yet I was not.
Selastine was not alone. Between the halo of his flashlight and the impenetrable void, in the gray murk between certainty and imagination, I saw something like a great drifting shadow. It was sleek, as long as a car and as black as cooking charcoal. And it was circling the shark boss, slowly, slowly, and if I could have pulled myself down just a little deeper I would have been able to give it a shape, but even as I gaped I was beginning to rise slowly back up toward the surface and the shark boss was becoming a blur, and his pool of light was shrinking and the great shadow was melting into the murk.
I wasn’t certain at the time what I saw. I never spoke to Selastine about it. When he bobbed to the surface a moment after me, he just smiled and said, “Gudfala moon! Gudfala night!” again, and I agreed. We paddled to the shallows and splashed around a bit, while the pipe drum band thumped away beyond the distant mangroves. We returned to the fire and drank hot water mixed with milk powder.
Selastine asked me to stay a week, so we could fish and dive on the reef. I told him I couldn’t. I told him I was bound for the Santa Cruz Group, to look for Bishop Patteson’s ghost on Nukapu. He understood. Then he asked for my diving mask, and I gave it to him.
When I returned to Honiara, I didn’t think about the circling shadow, not even when my friend Morris asked me about Langa Langa. Did I see the shark spirit? Did we have a tourist attraction? he asked. No, I told him. No, I told all my friends, though each time I told my story, I felt it could have been more complete. And then, late one evening aft
er the lights had failed and the rascals had fled the city, after the conversation of a dozen men had trailed away around me and there was no sound but the rustling of palms and the whirring of cicadas, as the perspiration seeped down my back and the circle of listeners drew close, I let myself say yes. Yes, I saw a shadow in the deep. Yes, it was big and it was as black as cooking charcoal, and every sweep of its tail fin raised a storm of silt from the lagoon floor. Yes, that shadow had circled ever so slowly around my friend the shark boss, who was sitting cross-legged on a bed of crushed coral. And the story became whole, and I grew more certain every time I repeated it. Now there is no doubt. Yes, it was a shark. Yes, it was Bolai. Yes, an ancestor could still be summoned from the darkness. I would believe, and it would be true because I believed.
Myth, like love, is a decision. What it answers is longing. What it demands is faith. What it opens is possibility.
19
The Brothers and Their Miracles
And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.
—Exodus 4:2–3
When I returned from Langa Langa and found neither the Temotu nor the Eastern Trader in port, I was not surprised or particularly upset. I went straight to Chester Rest House, a hostelry run by the Melanesian Brotherhood. There were no guards at the rest house, nor was it wrapped in barbed wire like the Quality Motel. But it was the safest place to bunk in Honiara. A rascal wouldn’t dare risk God’s anger by crossing the tasiu. I did not go to Chester for protection, but to get closer to the brothers and to their magic. I was ready for both.
The Shark God Page 28
