The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  I followed the trail through a great maze of vines and spiraling banyan roots, up through a series of cliffs and onto a ridge pockmarked with vents that steamed and oozed iron-red mud. From there, I could see over the forest and coconut plantations to the Pacific. Storms seemed to be coming from all directions. Shadows raced across the ocean. Then the rain swept across the mountain and hit just as I entered a village, making it seem especially squalid. Hundreds of grass huts jostled for space on a small plateau and spilled down a series of mud ravines. The huts were new, judging by the pale jade of their thatch, but they were not like the quaint bungalows I had seen elsewhere on Tanna. These were makeshift lean-tos and A-frames, all of them ill-proportioned and too low to stand in. Children shrieked and rolled in the muck. Sores glistened on their ankles and on their heads. There was a dirt parade ground, too, with a bamboo pole planted dead center. Dangling limply from it was the U.S. flag.

  A man stepped forward.

  “Fred?” I asked.

  “No, I’m Alfred. Come with me.”

  I followed him toward a broad, open-air shelter. Trailing behind us was what appeared to be the village idiot: a quiet fellow with an abnormally large and slightly misshapen head. He made me nervous. He walked so close I could see the patches of hair missing between his dreadlocks and the tears that streamed constantly from his left eye. He had an untidy beard and wore a filthy ski parka that had once been green and pink. But it was the man’s head that captivated me. It looked as though it had been fashioned from rubber and then squeezed at the temples, or melted, so that his forehead seemed on the verge of collapsing around his eyes. He had no eyebrows. Of course. Leprosy. This was Fred, the prophet.

  We sat on a bench under the shelter. Rain dripped through the thatch roof. I explained that I was here to help Fred spread his message around the world. Fred mumbled like a child in his own language and dabbed at his teary eye with a pair of torn bikini briefs. Alfred interpreted. This, he said, was the prophet’s true story:

  Fred was born in Sulphur Bay but had spent a decade working on a Taiwanese fishing boat. In his last year at sea, he began having visions. They came to him as lights from the sky, like stars, only they shot straight at him. Fred wasn’t afraid when the lights came. He would just close his eyes and go to sleep. That’s when he would hear the voice. It reassured him. It gave him clues about the future. Fred knew the voice was God talking to him. One day, the voice told him he should return to his own island to bring the people together in peace, so Fred came home to Sulphur Bay and began sharing his predictions with his neighbors.

  In one vision, Fred saw the lake at the base of the volcano, Lake Siwi. He saw that the water in the lake was not good. The volcano was polluting it with ash. The voice advised Fred to pray to make the water run out of the lake. He did. It worked. And now, said Fred—through Alfred—the water in the creek at Sulphur Bay was much better for drinking. Fred gained credibility, at least with those whose homes hadn’t been destroyed by the flood.

  Then Fred predicted the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. When the prophecy came true, his followers paraded in Port Vila to show their sympathy for ’Merica. That’s when an American gave Fred the flag that now flew above his village.

  “Any other miracles?” I asked.

  Fred gave a long, slurred reply. Alfred gave me the Reader’s Digest version: “Before Fred came back, the volcano used to explode and kill many people. But Fred asked God to make it stop. It did. Oh, and the hurricanes. There will be no hurricanes on Tanna for five years.”

  I asked politely about Fred’s alleged dark side. “Some people say you are working black magic here to trick people and make them sick.”

  Fred rolled his eyes back into his skull, then leveled them at me. “Hem i no tru. Hem i rubbish toktok,” he said. “Disfala power, hem i power blong God.”

  Black magic and prophecy are not covered by Vanuatu criminal law. That must have been why the police had tried to use the Canadian doctor to oust Fred. I told Fred what the doctor had told me: that he was not crazy. He nodded his appreciation.

  “But what are you doing up here on the mountain?” I asked.

  Fred returned to his mumbling.

  “God told Fred to bring the people together in Unity,” translated Alfred. “All the churches, John Frum people, and kastom people, must come together and follow one way. One people in Unity. So we sing John Frum songs on Wednesday beneath the flag. And on Sunday we go to the church. Unity! See?”

  Perhaps, but the truth was that the rest of the days, Fred’s hungry followers stole food from surrounding villages. I didn’t say that.

  “How long will you stay up here?”

  “Fred had a vision about that, too,” said Alfred. “He saw that twelve virgin boys would be circumcised. Only then will God tell us what we should do next.”

  “I thought all boys on Tanna were circumcised.”

  “Yes, but these boys would be circumcised by God.” Alfred paused for effect. “And the miracle has already begun. The first boy has been cut. Nobody touched him. His parents simply found him circumcised one morning last week.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “The boy?”

  “Well, yes, but really, it’s his miracle penis that counts.”

  “No. But you come back tomorrow. Tomorrow we bring John Frum together with Jesus.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but it sounded like just the kind of spectacle I had been hoping for all week. Alfred patted my shoulder encouragingly. Fred offered me his hand, which was as soft and cold as an oyster, then wandered off to gaze at the clouds. Fred might not have been crazy, but he certainly didn’t seem to have enough of a grip on reality to be in charge of this operation. Who was? And who was in charge of Fred? Before I left, Alfred made me promise to return the next day with my camera so the world would have proof of Fred’s religion, Unity.

  I trotted down to Port Resolution and searched the village for Stanley, to let him know I was alive. I saw him, once, across the soccer field, and I waved. Stanley didn’t wave back. He turned and fled into the woods, and I never saw him again. In fact nobody in Port Resolution was so keen to talk with me after my visit with Fred.

  The next morning Fred preached to a rapt crowd of four hundred up on the mountain. I couldn’t understand any of it, other than the words New Jerusalem, which he shouted over and over. Encouraged by Alfred, I climbed through the brambles at the edge of the clearing and took photos. That’s where I learned there was no toilet in New Jerusalem.

  Most of the congregation wore rags, but there were two men in white shirts and ties. They sat on a bench behind Fred, beaming and nodding with approval as he spoke. The younger one waved to me as I attempted to wipe the shit from my sandals. He motioned for me to come sit with him on the VIP bench.

  “You must take many photos,” he said, straightening his tie. “Fred is a very important man. Take many photos and send me copies of them. I want to present them to the Presbyterian Congress on Makira, to show them our work here.”

  The man’s name was Pastor Maliwan Taruei. He was the grandson of the Presbyterian minister who had battled it out with the John Frummers back in the 1940s. Isag Wan’s grandfather had driven Taruei’s grandfather out of Sulphur Bay, then torn down his church. Now Maliwan Taruei had rebuilt it. The family feud was still on.

  “Isag Wan is destroying this island with his idol worship,” the pastor whispered to me as Fred preached.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Isag Wan is a sweet old man,” I said.

  “Well, anyway, Fred is much better. Look at him, he is just like Moses. He led four thousand, four hundred sixty-six people up this hill, just like Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt to the promised land. And best of all, Fred invited the Presbyterian Church.”

  Wasn’t it strange, I asked, for the church to support a man who championed both God and kastom magic? It didn’t fit with any version of Christianity I had ever heard of. “Aha, you don’t understan
d Tanna, do you? Our kastom stories are just like the Bible stories. Don’t you know the real name of our volcano? It’s not Yasur. It’s Yahweh, the Hebrew name for God. The Bible tells us that one day the world will become paradise. But kastom tells us that one day Tanna will become a paradise, a new Jerusalem. Tanna people know we have two choices. We pray for both of them.”

  “But is your savior Jesus or John Frum?”

  “My friend, God will give us the answer, and it will be one of them. Either way, I assure you that the church has returned to Sulphur Bay, and all these people will be there on Sunday.”

  Taruei was facing the same dilemma the first missionaries had faced on Tanna: Was winning people’s allegiance more important than the shape of faith itself? For Taruei, getting bums into church pews was clearly more important than preserving the purity of Presbyterian doctrine.

  The crowd had disappeared. Now they were back, filing onto the dirt plaza by the hundreds. They had changed out of their rags. The men came first, banana leaves tied around their heads and bare chests shining in the sun. Women followed, their faces painted yellow and orange like hornets. They wore feathers in their hair and grass skirts dyed with rainbow checkers. Wreaths of Christmas tinsel dangled from their necks. Their dance was not the dead-eyed shake of Kelsen’s nambas-clad friends, nor was it the cheery campfire rumba I had joined in in Namakara. It was like a war dance. The men stamped the earth, grunting and exhaling simultaneously in great stormy whooshes. The women gathered around them in loose whorls, wailing and waving tree branches toward the Stars and Stripes. They charged the flag, jumped back again, and raced in circles until the plaza became a maelstrom of dust and leaping bodies. The Presbyterian Congress, I thought, would be mortified.

  The pastors shifted nervously on the grass mats where they now sat. The older one adjusted his glasses. He looked like the square kid in a room full of marijuana smoke. Taruei reached for my hand, but I couldn’t sit still. Shaking with excitement, I dashed across the clearing, climbed to the roof of a hut, and pulled out my camera. There was Fred, sitting alone on a footstool, watching the dance with one eye and me with the other. He nodded when I pointed my camera at him. Taruei shouted to the dancers, who quickened their pace. I raised the camera to my eye, and the frame was filled with dust, flashing color, and shining skin. The crowd had spread across the plaza: the frame couldn’t contain them all. I stood up, straddling the gable of the hut, raised my arms above my head, motioned like Jesus on the mount. Closer together. Move closer together. The crowd responded.

  “Closer!” I shouted when the dance ended. The crowd moved closer still. Adrenaline rushed through my veins.

  “Raise your arms to the sky,” I shouted when the dance ended. “Not Fred, just the rest of you!” They did as they were told, sweat-drenched men, dust-caked women, naked children, all four hundred of them; even the Presbyterian pastors stretched their arms in the air. It felt wonderful to see them obey. The dancers all looked up at me, knowing that they had done good work, knowing they were among the first to proclaim a message of peace and unity that would certainly sweep across Tanna and, with my help, around the world.

  I gazed down at Fred, standing serenely among his followers. It would be easy to be a messiah here. You have your visions. You make your prophecies. You lead your people to the mountain. You tell them a new story. Then, if you are lucky, you are martyred like Jesus or you disappear like John Frum. If you are unlucky, you just go on living while your aura fades and you become ordinary again. But the key to success is your own faith. It must be rock solid. In other words, you either possess supernatural powers or you are nuts. There is no middle ground.

  It was one thing to believe in yourself. But the faith of the people, where did it come from? The Tannese seemed to have the capacity to accept any prophet, any myth. They were more than just tolerant. They had sponges for souls. Kastom traditionalists sacrificed to the spirits and waited for John Frum. John Frummers waited for Jesus and John. Christians hedged their bets. Nobody was interested in discussing the contradictions.

  I had always traced the impulses of faith to environment. In the years after I abandoned my family’s church, I found that the universe spoke to me most loudly in the fullness of mountains, the endlessness of the sea, the fury of storms, the boom and crack of living physics…that’s when the world itself seemed to offer a voice and a breath that felt something like mana, and which begged to be given a name and a shape and a myth to explain it all. Tanna was a nexus of such signals. The landscape was as powerful, as crowded, as sharply schizophrenic, as the island’s apparent train wreck of faiths. The island was a confluence of primal signals. The vibrating jungle. The dusty stillness of the ash plain. The torrential rains. The fires of Yasur. Yes, the volcano, which had not ceased bellowing since my arrival, declaring its power, demanding attention.

  I slid back down the thatch roof, shook two hundred hands, then jogged to Port Resolution. I caught a lift on a Land Cruiser headed for Lenakel but jumped out when we reached the ash plain.

  I stood for an hour there at the foot of the volcano. The mountain didn’t make a sound. In the last few years, tourists had begun to fly down to Tanna from Port Vila, drawn by the spectacle of Yasur’s eruptions like moths to a giant flame. A handful had been struck and killed by flying rocks. Two weeks before my arrival, a woman had ventured onto the mountain and was hit by a rock that melted a hole in her leg. Kelsen had advised me that the bombs only flew north. Or was it east?

  Almost without thinking, I started up through the ash, slowly at first, pausing to gaze at the crest of the cinder cone with each tentative step. I sank up to my ankles in the rubble, sliding a step back for every two forward. Sand gathered between my toes. I cursed my sandals. I stumbled over bucket-sized pockmarks and yard-wide craters. They all cradled stones: some were as delicate and light as pumice, others looked like pieces of flesh ripped from a burned corpse. Some were all bubble and froth, the texture of water frozen in midboil. Some were as big as bathtubs. Some had settled into the earth, as though they had been spit from the volcano decades before. Others were young: the sand around them had been heat-seared into a frosty white ring still undisturbed by rain. But hadn’t it rained just that morning?

  I was three-quarters of the way up the mountain when it made the most terrifying sound. I could tell you it went boom, but that wouldn’t be enough. Roared? Not enough. Thundered? Perhaps. It was the kind of sound that assures you that you are a fool, and that if you die, everyone will know you were a fool. A fool, a fool, I thought as the ground trembled and the sand trickled around my feet. I couldn’t see past the crest of the cone. I remembered what Kelsen had told me. Don’t run away when the mountain explodes. Don’t turn your back. Face it, so that you can sidestep the bombs when they come at you. Ridiculous. The mountain shook again, hollering at me to turn back. I did think of turning back. But sometimes a journey takes on a momentum that won’t listen to logic.

  I carried on, pulling at the sand and ash, my knees grinding into the scree. My feet bled under the straps of my sandals. I didn’t decide to beg: the words just seemed to form themselves amid the moans each time I exhaled. Please don’t kill me. If you spare me, I promise not to point my camera into your crater. It was all I could think of to offer. I know it sounds absurd, begging to a mountain. I knew it at the time. Mountains cannot hear. But if you were there, you would have done the same thing, even as you reminded yourself that the unthinking forces of gravity and physics and geology were never meant to be anthropomorphized.

  I reached a cornice of fractured rock and peered over it into the crater, which was the size of a soccer stadium. There were three pits at the bottom. One glowed faintly orange. Another smoked like a bonfire of wet leaves. Occasionally it sucked at the late-afternoon air like a steam engine. The third had no bottom. I gazed into that crater, and I didn’t see John Frum’s armies or a fiery spirit or the power of a heavenly God. I knew the rumbling, the explosions, the tremendous heaving power,
all of it came from the earth. The mountain did not have feelings. It would not respond to my prayers any more than it would to Fred’s commands. I was certain about these things. So why did I leave my camera in its case? Why did I reach instead into my pocket, pull out a five-hundred-vatu note, and slip it under a rock? I did not ask these questions at the time. I didn’t allow myself a moment to feel foolish about keeping my promise to the volcano.

  The sun was setting. I scrambled along the south edge of the crater until I reached a fence made from bamboo sticks. Someone had built a makeshift lookout on the lip of the precipice. This would be the pristine side of the volcano. I followed a trail that led down from the lookout toward a plateau a few hundred yards away. There was a truck there, and someone waving. As I waved back, the mountain boomed like a cannon, then boomed again behind me. I turned and froze. Magma sprayed into the purpling sky: great gobs of red-and-black-mottled jelly spiraled, spun, broke apart in the heavens before finding their weight, losing momentum, and falling back down toward the earth. The igneous rain exploded across the slope I had just crossed.

  I ran-stumbled down toward the truck. It contained four men, volcanologists who had flown down from Vila for a night of fireworks. The men toasted my arrival with tin cups of instant coffee. They said they had been sprinting back and forth to the crater’s edge all afternoon. It was the coffee that kept them going, one said, laughing. As if on cue, a bearded fellow with a heavy brow appeared to refill their cups. I should have known. Kelsen. If Yasur was Tanna’s real temple, then Kelsen was its money changer. He had lugged a kettle up from his village and lit a little fire at the edge of the plateau. Coffee was one hundred vatu a shot.