TEETH - The Epic Novel With Bite (The South Pacific Trilogy)

by Timothy James Dean

  “Thank you Mas… thank you, true!”

  “Go on!” Johnny told them, “and watch where you’re going.”

  The road was so congested he had to walk again. Over the heads he saw the marketplace among the warehouses. Once a coffee shed had stood there, but it had been bombed by the Japanese and had burned to the ground. The native market sprang up on the ring of scorched earth.

  Today before first light, hundreds of vendors had come in from the villages. The women did the gardening and they came carrying nearly their own weight in bilums—woven string bags. These bulged with yams and sweet potatoes called kaukau, and a variety of vegetables. Many had a baby tucked in somewhere around her person as well. Others had infants perched on their hips, handy to the nipple, and round-bellied youngsters on their heels. Other folks carried yellow and green papayas, bundles of sugar cane on their heads, tamarillos known locally as “tree tomatoes,” and baskets of purple passion fruit.

  On impulse, Johnny went into the market. There were only a few Caucasians in the crush—Australian housewives, shopping for their groceries. Johnny passed between rudimentary stalls—four posts in the earth with a grass roof, or simply a mat spread on the dirt.

  Many sellers offered pyramids of the green and reddish nuts called buai—the betel nut of the Areca palm. The stimulant was hugely popular all over the island. People chewed betel and slaked its acidic burn with quicklime. Buai stained their lips and gums red, and eventually, turned their teeth black. A chaw stimulated abundant saliva, which caused much spitting, and every road and public place was splattered scarlet. This disgusted the whites, but the people adored their addiction.

  Johnny watched fishermen hawk strings of eels and fish. Other sellers offered chickens, both the quick and dead, and eggs piled on nests of moss. Some brought the denizens of the jungle; marsupial cuscus (a cuddly possum), wallabies and tree kangaroos with their extra long tails. Then there were the feathered set, great white cockatoos, green, red and blue parrots, and the flightless cassowaries with their horny crests. Most prized of all, their iridescent plumes desired for headdresses and body decoration, were the Birds of Paradise. These jay-size birds looked like they’d fallen into vats of neon bright paint.

  The cacophony in the market was deafening, but above it rose the scream of pigs. All their lives, these had been coddled like children. They shared the family home, and some had suckled at a woman’s breast with her infants. But at last their true status in village life had been revealed. They were run down, trussed up, and cheerfully dragged to market. In fact, they were all kaikai—food. The hogs did not accept their reversal of fortune quietly. All gave earsplitting voice to their outrage.

  As a million flies and mosquitoes swarmed uninvited to the feast, the crowd descended on the vendors. Jeering and joking, alternately trading insults and wheedling for mercy, the people bargained for live and butchered animals, fresh vegetables and not-so-fresh fish.

  Johnny cut through the marketplace ripe with body odor and the stench of animals. He approached a group from the Catholic mission. Dozens of teenage native girls were dressed in plaid skirts, and white blouses, with socks and shoes. Overseeing them were several nuns and a white-haired priest, all sweltering in dark woolens. Arranged in a line were their baskets piled with exotic fruit from their compound—guavas, mangoes and melons.

  Two of the older girls spotted the approach of the tall American. His dark hair hung on his neck, and they took in the strong arms, chest, and flat stomach under his tight undershirt. They nudged one another and turned dazzling smiles on the dreamy young man.

  “Hey handsome!” one sang out, “You see something you like?” She turned her significant caboose and wiggled it.

  “You want some mangoes?” the other one called, putting her hands under her breasts and lifting them. There was a collective gasp from the nuns, who ran at the girls and began to slap.

  “Naughty! Verra naughty!” Johnny caught an accent thick as porridge. The teenagers were unperturbed. They warded off the blows, beaming all the while. Johnny grinned and winked. He stepped by while the old priest glared at him, jowls aquiver.

  “Padre,” Johnny said, touching a finger to his head. The gaggle giggled while the scandalized nuns clucked over them.

  Johnny turned back and took to the road once more. As he got further away, the crowd thinned and he could run again. His muscles were warm, and he felt a welcome surge of returning energy. He broke into a sprint, jumping the puddles.

  Gwyndolyn picked her way towards the hospital, trying not to muddy her shoes. She chatted with Ruthie, her fellow nurse and apartment mate. Even though it was early, it was already ferocious with the kind of heat only the tropics could brew up. Towards the harbor, the sky was blue, but purple-bottomed cumuli were stacking against the inland hills.

  It will pour again this afternoon, Gwyn thought, loosening the collar of the uniform she’d ironed last night. This morning, she showered in cool water and slipped it on. Just before leaving the apartment she added the winged cap, bobby-pinned to her chestnut curls.

  Gwyn was twenty-three, and a graduate of the Vancouver School of Nursing. A small-town girl from the interior of British Columbia, her life, like millions of others, had been transformed by the second world war in only thirty years. Because of it, all her experience as an RN had been overseas. Gwyn had responded to the Motherland’s call for assistance from her former colonies, the Commonwealth of Nations.

  Gwyn had met Ruthie Flynn, an Irish nurse, at the hospital in London. After several months there, both had volunteered to take part in the Allied effort in the South Pacific. At the military hospital in Port Moresby, their patients remained soldiers, but American and Australian instead of British.

  At first they had bunked with other nurses on the hospital grounds. They had a common room where they could listen to the news and music on the radio. But soon, as they had done in London, they went in search of private digs. Nearby, they found a flat—the floor of a house owned by an elderly New Zealand couple. It had two small bedrooms, a kitchenette with its own kerosene refrigerator, and a bathroom with a shower bucket.

  Most of their time was spent at the hospital. In her spare time, Gwyn made friends with the Australian women. Many were long-time residents who had married men with government jobs or plantations. They set up home and raised their families.

  Of course, that was before the Japanese invaded New Guinea. In 1942, the Imperial Navy had steamed around the island toward the capital, and their aircraft had bombed it. The enemy even dared attack Darwin on the north coast of Australia. Thankfully, the American Navy thwarted their incursion, at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Not to be stopped so easily, the enemy then swarmed overland. When it appeared Port Moresby would fall, the women fled with their progeny for “Aus”—Australia.

  But here in 1945, in Port Moresby at least, the threat was over. The Aussie womenfolk returned. Once more, they took command of their homes and became the hub around which the men revolved.

  The women were earthy and practical, in Gwyn’s experience, many with a plainly spoken exterior that masked a pillowy heart. She also struck up friendships with the natives. Contrary to some advice she received—not to get too familiar—she visited them in their humble houses. Gwyn found them to be respectful, generous with whatever they had, and possessors of a lively sense of humor. She enjoyed the frequent laughter.

  It was while visiting these native sections of town that she discovered the homeless children. Bands roamed the streets, looking for handouts, sleeping where they could. The balmy temperature made that easy, but Gwyn was troubled that these youngsters had no home, no one to love them. She made inquiries and found they were victims of the war. Some were “half castes,” the mixed-race legacy of foreign soldiers. One way or another, they were all orphans.

  Gwyn’s heart went out to them and her project was born. In it, she found a powerful ally in the Director of the hospital, Doctor Gillis MacClure. The elderly medical man known
to everyone as “Doc Mac,” went to bat for her with authorities. Recently, Gwyn had been granted possession of a huge house, run down as it was and in need of repair. The Aussie owners had perished in a wartime shipwreck, and no heirs had yet shown up. She would not get ownership papers, she was told, but for the time being, the seedy plantation-style home was hers.

  Gywn dubbed it “the Good Shepherd Orphanage,” and she raised funds and volunteer work parties from the local churches. Carpenters cut away the worst of the rot, and the place got a coat of Army-green paint, courtesy of the Americans. Gwyn hired a three-person native staff to cook and clean. Soon she had sixteen boys and girls, ages two through nineteen, living in the house.

  She set up school in the living room. She cajoled Ruthie and Australian friends to teach. True, it was little more than the alphabet, simple words, and the addition and multiplication tables, but it was better than nothing.

  The Orphanage consumed all of Gwyn’s spare time. Ever more frequently, her nights were spent sleeping there. She and Ruthie began to talk about what had become increasingly clear. One day soon, Gwyn would move into the Good Shepherd for good.

  But on this Saturday morning as she and Ruthie walked to work, Gwyn was unable to focus on the children. Nor was she following the story Ruthie told about last night’s dance. Gwyn was thinking about a man she’d agreed to meet later today. She’d noticed the warm gleam in his eye for some time now, and at last he had forced the situation to come to a head.

  And that’s unfortunate, Gwyn thought. She liked him well enough, but the encounter was going to turn out badly.

  For him, that is.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Colonel noticed an unpleasant odor wafting off the letter. He brought it gingerly toward his nose. Stale sweat, smoke—God knows what else! He picked the Japanese dagger off the table. The men had made a present of it when he’d arrived. He slid the scrolled blade under the flap as Dingo continued talking.

  “A patrol brought that in—they’d been out a coupla-hundred miles to the west. They ran across a native runner out there, or vice versa, I suppose. My blokes reckon that bush kanaka had spent a month crossing the mountains. ‘One-fella moon’—you know how they talk. The bugger was starved. They had to feed him before he could speak.

  “Turns out the kanaka had walked all the way from the Catholic mission at the headwaters of the Raub River. Kissim! Know where that is, Henry? Don’t blame you if you don’t—few do. Other side of the bleedin’ mountains. Blimey! The Raub River flows north from there—other way from us, exits on the north coast. Much shorter for our runner to go down the ‘Big River,’ as the locals call it, but not a good idea. Very bad one. Get to that in a moment. Somehow he managed to cross the range—no small feat in itself. I tell you, Henry, no white man would have made it, not even me.” Dingo grinned. “Somehow this kanaka managed to avoid his own bloodthirsty countrymen along the way.”

  The Colonel was well aware Dingo had lived in New Guinea for more than twenty years. It came up regularly in his conversation. The Major called all natives “kanakas” unless one was from deep in the jungle, and then he was a “bush kanaka.” The Australian had grown coconuts at the coast and coffee in the high country. When the Japanese invaded, along with every other able-bodied male, he joined the army. “The wife and sprouts,” he shipped back to Aus, to her parents’ farm. He’d closed down his plantations for the duration, and turned the Moresby house into bachelor quarters.

  The Colonel wanted to get to the letter, but he had his duties as host. He passed a glass of juice to Dingo and took a sip of his own.

  “Ta,” the Major said. He hung his hat on a knee and drank, while the fan lifted the damp tendrils off his forehead. He drained his glass, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and continued.

  “We haven’t had any contact with Kissim since before the war. Between the crocodiles and the cannibals, Henry, the Raub River is the last place you want to be. The priests used to get their supplies by air—the only way in and out. But all that ended with the war. Truth is, with the Japs on their way, we forgot about the poor bastards. Might as well have dropped off the face of the Earth.”

  “I want to hear more,” the Colonel said, “but let’s get to the letter.”

  “Aw yes,” Dingo said. “Must admit—got my ears perked up.”

  EXCERPT FROM THE JOURNALS OF COLONEL HENRY CHAMBERS, JR.

  US ARMY, NEW GUINEA, 1945

  The Importance of Teeth

  Dear Reader, in order to comprehend New Guinea, you must grasp its size. The island is the second largest in the world, after Greenland, three hundred thousand square miles sprawled across the South Pacific. It is larger than our great State of Texas—more than twice the size of the British Isles.

  This impossibly rugged land has perhaps six million inhabitants. This is a rough estimate, as it remains mostly unexplored and extremely dangerous. The Stone Age savages are divided into a thousand tribes that speak a thousand entirely different languages, none of which are written. That makes New Guinea a linguist’s paradise, and an administrator’s nightmare.

  For four hundred years, it was mostly the coastal dwellers who had any interaction with the outside world. These were the ones to meet the sailing ships that brought explorers, adventurers, pirates, whalers, traders, and eventually, colonists and missionaries.

  It was the 16th Century Spaniard, Ortiz de Retez, who gave the island its name. Perhaps he was reminded of Guinea in Africa, and he named the exotic place on the far side of the world, “Nueva Guinea.”

  In the early 19th Century, a vertical line drawn with a ruler down a map in Europe split the island neatly in half. Never mind that it parted rivers, carved tribal lands and even bisected villages. Half a world away, the tiny Netherlands claimed the western portion.

  The eastern half was split again with horizontal lines. The British colony of Queensland, in Australia, claimed “Papua,” the southern section. (“Papua” is another ancient name for the place, signifying “frizzy hair”).

  The northern portion was annexed by Germany under the grand title of “Kaiser Whilhelmsland.” Deutschland’s interest was trade. In order to meet the burgeoning demand for oil, they wanted “copra”—the dried meat of the coconut. As well, they collected exotic pelts, feathers and shells. Many a fraulein had her ensemble set off with an artifact from a headhunter’s hand.

  As well as literally having to keep their heads while they conducted business here, the challenge for the Germans was how to pay the natives. What would be the coin of the realm with people who placed no value on silver and gold? As with elsewhere in the new worlds, a handful of glass beads went a long way. The gaudy Dutch variety had been popular for centuries. They could barter bolts of cloth, steel knives and axes, and more, but what could they use for currency itself?

  They observed that some natives paid one another with teeth—the teeth of crocodiles, the huge fruit bats called “flying foxes,” and dogs. Yes, dogs. Some wealthy villagers sported elaborate canine necklaces that made them walking banks.

  The 19th Century Deutschlanders hit upon the splendid idea of manufacturing these coveted denticles. Back in the Fatherland once more, their factories began to spit out porcelain. When the traders of the “Neu Guinea Kompanie” sailed again to the “insel der kannibalen” (island of the cannibals), they brought New Guinea money by the caseload. The natives were stunned by the result. These teeth were translucent, absolutely perfect. The pale men must possess the master race of dogs!

  For a time, the false teeth did increase Deutschland’s bite of New Guinea trade, but they also spread a peculiarly Western malaise; inflation. The factories would churn out far more canine currency than Nature could ever produce.

  When the Fatherland fell during World War One (not yet three decades ago at the time of this writing), German New Guinea was erased from the maps. While the Dutch managed to hold the western half, the entire eastern portion came under Australian dominion, now known as the Territo
ries of Papua and New Guinea.

  Significantly, even then, it was Japan that laid claim to the other German dominated islands of the South Pacific.

  The rest of the world should have been paying closer attention.

  Johnny was puffing like a steam engine and his knees were rubbery. The drill of pain in his chest had become a general torment down his left side. Johnny’s fingers dug into his shoulder, but he did not slow his pace.

  This latest wound was the only one he had not taken in New Guinea. This time, he’d been shot in the ancient Asian city once called “the Jewel of the Orient.” Of course, that was before the war knocked Manila down.

  Johnny had spent most of the war in New Guinea, then gone with Supreme Commander MacArthur to the Philippines. He’d been there to see the General, with his senior officers and Filipino dignitaries, wade ashore at Leyte Island. He was in the throng of soldiers landed that day. MacArthur had made a rousing speech and then came down the line of men. He recognized Johnny and stopped.

  “God’s hand is with us, my boy,” he said, clapping his shoulder and smiling around his pipe. “The eyes of the world are watching. I have returned, and we will prevail!”

  The next time he saw the Commander was on the road to Manila. Johnny was in the back of a truck with other GIs, part of a huge convoy wheeling through the towns. There was a festive feeling in the air. Filipino families lined the roads, cheering their liberators on. Johnny watched the jeep come charging from the rear and recognized the peaked cap, hawk nose, and aviator sunglasses. General MacArthur towered up in his seat.

  “Faster men!” he boomed, sweeping his arm. “On to Manila!” A column of tanks rattled by on the embankment. No doubt they would get there first.

  But the Philippines turned out to be anything but a cakewalk for MacArthur. Four hundred and thirty thousand seasoned Japanese troops were massed there, and they’d had years to dig in. Every GI who’d faced them on other fronts knew what fighters they were, often choosing death over surrender. And in the Philippines, “the Japs” were made even more determined by their predicament. If they were beaten here, the Yankees’ next stop was unthinkable, intolerable; their own sacred homeland.