The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  We raced through the clouds, which seemed different now. Everything was different after my storm: mist, rocks, and trees were infused with personality, willpower, potential energy. The world vibrated with mana, and I could feel it—I could almost see it flowing through the air. I was terrified of losing my new vision. I wanted to feed it.

  The promise of magic walked the very streets of the capital. The Melanesian Brotherhood’s headquarters were just west of Honiara, so the tasiu were everywhere in the city. I saw them each time I returned. Some wore the same humble black-and-white uniform I had seen Ken Brown wearing back in Vureas Bay. Others, the novices, wore electric blue robes with red sashes. They walked barefoot or in flip-flops. Their brass medallions glinted in the sunlight. They held hands and giggled like schoolchildren. I was in awe of them, and yet somehow not ready to confront them. I suppose I was worried their magic would not stand up to my challenge. I wanted a sure thing. And so I looked to the ocean.

  The islanders who were recruited by the Southern Cross assured the missionaries that the most powerful locus of magic was the world beyond their island shores. The creatures that lived in salt water always held the most mana. Alligators, sea snakes, bonitos, and frigate birds: any of these animals might be inhabited by a tindalo, the soul of a dead man. The most sacred sea creature of all was the shark. Sometimes, before a man died, he announced that he would return by sea; his wantoks knew the deceased had come home when they spotted a shark remarkable for its size or color. Mission students told Codrington that a chief on Savo, off the coast of Guadalcanal, regularly swam out from his beach to make sacrifices to a shark, and that shark would come to him and gently accept his offers of food. The people loved and respected their ghost-sharks, but no people loved them more than the saltwater men of Malaita’s Langa Langa Lagoon. In the old days, a Langa Langa shark caller could summon a favorite shark to sink enemy canoes. The shark would drag the victims back to shore so they could be chopped up. Langa Langa priests regularly called sharks to their island. In exchange for bits of pork, the shark ancestors would allow young boys to ride across the lagoon on their backs.

  People still told stories about the shark callers. A fellow I met at the Mendaña Hotel bar told me that he was once fishing far out at sea with a Langa Langa man when their outboard engine conked out. This might have been the end of them, but the Langa Langa man took control. He jumped into the water and performed a strange swim-dance. Then he ordered my friend to go to sleep under the deck cover. “I didn’t sleep,” he told me. “I lay there and listened. Soon I felt waves breaking off the bow. We were moving quickly through the ocean—it was as though we were being pushed by an engine. After an hour, I got up and looked around. We were back in the harbor! Then that Langa Langa man, he swam to shore, collected some coconuts, brought them back to the boat, chopped them up, and threw them in the sea. That’s when I knew it was his shark granddaddy who had pushed us home.”

  Shark magic seemed like a sure thing. I told my friend Morris at the moribund national tourism office that we should promote sacred shark tourism; he could supply the shark priests with pig guts so they could toss them in the water and convince their ancestors to entertain paying customers. I would be the first. Morris insisted that Christianity had put an end to shark worship back in the 1970s. The descendants of the shark people now sipped the blood of Christ instead of slaughtering pigs and dumping the entrails in the sea, so naturally the sea spirits had abandoned them.

  “But don’t be sad,” said Morris. “The MV Temotu is back in port, haw haw! You will be leaving for Santa Cruz next week.” Morris seemed to be right about the Temotu. The ship’s purser even agreed to sell me a ticket to Nendo. Five days to go, he promised.

  But I was sure that Morris was wrong about the shark callers. I had found my connection. Her name was Veronica Kwalafa, and she ran a faith-healing clinic near the Quality Motel. (God had given Veronica the power in a dream back in 1987. He had shown himself as a bright star—just like the one the prophet Fred had seen before his return to Tanna Island. For $4, Veronica would hold your hand or massage your back, and because she had something like a television in her head, she could see your troubles and tell you how to fix them.)

  I had met Veronica weeks before. She had assured me there was one shark caller left in the Langa Langa Lagoon. He was her brother, of course, and he was the boss of the underwater world. He could talk to the sharks. He would wade into the shallows and caress them like pets. The sharks used their magic to help him walk for hours on the ocean floor. Veronica had said she’d take me to the shark caller if I promised to tell the world that her services were available via mail and that people with any kind of sickness could contact her through Mary Manisi, PO Box 93, Honiara.

  I promised. But whenever I returned to the faith-healing clinic to seal our deal, Veronica’s door was locked, and so it was on my return from New Georgia. I jumped up and down, slammed my palm against the hot paint, but Honiara never rewarded impatience. So I did what everyone with disposable income and time to kill did in the capital: I went to get smashed at the pool bar of the Mendaña Hotel.

  That’s where I met the saltwater men. They were stone drunk and not doing a good job of keeping their heads off the table. I knew they were from the lagoons of Malaita because, when they did lift their heads, I could see geometric engravings on their cheeks.

  They called to me: Could I please ask the bar manager to turn up the music? He would listen to a white man. The music was already loud. It was playing the New Guinean hit “Mi Dae Long Yu”—I’m dying for you. The Malaitans sang along:

  O daling, mi misim yu,

  O daling, mi luvim yu,

  O daling, mi dae long yu.

  I pulled up a chair and told the saltwater men about the shark caller of Langa Langa Lagoon. They said they belonged to Lau, a lagoon on the northeastern tip of Malaita.

  “The church wiped all the sacred fish from Langa Langa, and from our lagoon, too,” said the most sober of the three. His facial scars reminded me of the Nazca lines. There were two concentric circles with streaks shooting out from them like sunbeams. “It’s tabu for people to try to talk to sharks. Dangerous for the soul. We are Christians now.”

  “Ah, so then you wouldn’t mind a little shark’s fin soup.”

  “Don’t say that! The sharks are our ancestors.”

  The scarred man looked at me sternly. “Yu blong wea?” he asked.

  “Canada.”

  That brought a chorus of disapproving grumbles.

  “We once had strong kastom at our home in the Lau Lagoon,” the scarred man said. “An octopus. He took care of our ancestors. If they were lost at sea, he would bring them home. If they were drowning, he would save them.”

  “What was its name?” I asked.

  “We cannot tell you that. It’s a secret. Anyway, the octopus is gone now. Gone! And it was a wantok of yours, one man-Canada, who stole him from us.”

  All three men were fully awake now. “Maranda,” they said together.

  “Maranda, this thief, now he is showing our octopus to tourists in Canada,” said the second man.

  “He is making lots of sellen from our ancestor,” said the third, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in front of my nose.

  “What do you mean? He took the octopus on a plane?” I said.

  This was apparently a wildly stupid question. The men laughed. I bought more beer. And the story came.

  The sacred octopus was inhabited by an ancestor of the villagers at Foueda, an artificial island constructed from hunks of coral out on the Lau reef. The octopus had indeed been helpful to people, but he demanded sacrifices in return for his patronage. Sometimes the octopus would crawl right up out of the sea into a man’s canoe to let him know it was time for a sacrifice. He would crawl onto land, too. If you left a basket of food outside your door, the octopus would plunk himself down on top of it and engulf that kai-kai. He would change the color of his skin from red to black to show he w
as pleased. He preferred pig guts to fruit. To communicate with the octopus or sacrifice to him, you had to know his secrets. The only men who knew these things were the Lau kastom priests who had been handing down the sacred knowledge for centuries.

  The octopus’s troubles started when the Christians arrived. The missionaries called the octopus a devil. Young converts refused to learn the sacred kastom knowledge. The priests were left with no one to whom they could pass on their sacrificial rituals. The last of the priests were growing old when the white man named Maranda climbed ashore on Foueda. The priests refused to let him into their ancestral sanctuary, but Maranda was resourceful, said the scarred man. He tied a tape recorder to a stick and poked it over the wall of the sanctuary while the priests performed their sacrifices. That’s how he stole all their secret incantations. That’s why, when Maranda got on his boat and went back to Canada, the octopus followed him. Now the people of Foueda had no octopus to protect them from the perils of the sea.

  “But what about the kastom priests? Why couldn’t they stop the octopus from leaving?” I asked.

  “Dead,” said the scarred man. “All gone now.”

  “And there are no new priests to take their place?”

  “There can be no priest without the secret knowledge.”

  “So there are no priests.”

  “Don’t you see?” he cried. “Maranda is the only octopus priest!”

  “But Maranda, he was not so smart,” slurred number two. “He spoiled his sacrifices. He made the octopus very angry, so it made him sick. And it killed his wife.”

  I eventually tracked down the alleged octopus thief, who turned out to be the acclaimed cultural anthropologist Pierre Maranda, now professor emeritus of anthropology at Université Laval in Quebec City. Maranda and his wife had lived among the people of the Lau Lagoon from 1966 to 1968, and they had recorded the sacred knowledge.

  I e-mailed Maranda an account of my conversation with the saltwater men. In his response, Maranda admitted falling deathly ill after his first fieldwork in the lagoon. After he got sick, he said, the islanders made a sacrifice on his behalf, and he did recover, “which made them very happy.” Maranda insisted his illness was not a curse but a bout of malaria. As for his wife, she didn’t die until more than a decade after the octopus’s disappearance. Maranda told me he had assured the Lau people that he did not have their octopus in his swimming pool, but to no avail.

  Perhaps Maranda doesn’t deserve to be characterized as the trickster-villain of the Lau myth. In fact, he may have done them a lasting favor. He insists that the kastom priests encouraged him to record their secret prayers, and for very good reason. When Maranda returned to Foueda in 1975, Laakwai, one of Foueda’s two high priests, lamented that the old kastom was “finished.” The priest’s sons were refusing to take on his duties after his death. They had caught the Christian bug. The other high priest, Kunua, had the same problem. Ten years later, both priests had given up hope. Laakwai dove under a woman’s canoe, knowing he was committing a fatal reversal of high-low energy. Kunua purposefully botched a ritual. Both men died within weeks. It was suicide by metaphysical transgression. Thus, Maranda had become the sole keeper of Foueda’s sacred knowledge and the default kastom priest, a legacy he holds to this day in his office on the far side of the world. I suspect Maranda’s relationship with the myth is more than academic. When I asked him the name of the sacred octopus, he was no more forthcoming than the saltwater men in the Mendaña Hotel bar. The name, he said, was a secret he could only divulge to a Lau successor committed to honoring the ancient kastom. He’s still looking for that man.

  My encounter with the saltwater men filled me with an even greater sense of urgency. With beer on my breath and sea spirits on my mind, I stumbled back across town to look once more for the faith healer, Veronica Kwalafa.

  The door to the healing clinic was open. I walked in to find no lights on and the ceiling fan cruelly immobile. The power was out. I could hear Veronica humming quietly behind a curtain at the back of the office, where she had shown me the tools of her trade (a crystal ball, a Bible, and a Hello Kitty ruler).

  Veronica’s husband, Philip, was fast asleep on a wooden desk in the reception area. I cleared my throat. He didn’t stir.

  “You promised to take me to the shark boss, and then you disappeared,” I said.

  Philip lifted his head. It took a moment for the arc of saliva between the desktop and his slack lower lip to break. Veronica appeared. I liked Veronica. She was soft. Her white hair had the texture of candy floss. I did not like Philip. He was a lazy slug of a man. Veronica did the healing. Philip guarded Veronica’s box of money. She was big enough to crush him, but she called him Daddy.

  “We are very busy. We cannot guide you to Langa Langa,” said Philip.

  Sweat rolled down my back. I imagined taking my chair and breaking it over Philip’s head. It was the heat that made me feel such things. I ignored him.

  “I want to help you,” I said to Veronica. “I want to show the world that your brother still has the power.”

  “He does! He does have the power,” she said.

  With five days to go before the Temotu’s departure for Santa Cruz, I didn’t have much time, but I did have a plan. Solomon Airlines advertised daily Twin Otter flights to Auki. Malaitans could afford to fly; they had all that compensation money to spend. I could fly, too. I had my credit card. It would be a treat for Veronica, who had apparently been too honest to make a compensation claim after the civil war.

  “Wouldn’t you like to go see your brother?” I said to her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “We’ll fly to Auki together tonight. I’ll pay. Then we can look for your brother in the morning. But the thing is, we can only stay for four days.”

  How could she resist?

  “Daddy,” she said quietly, “what do you think? Should I go?”

  Philip ignored her. He was doodling on a scrap of paper and sucking his lower lip like a spoiled child. He was jealous of Veronica.

  “Daddy?”

  I was beginning to despise him.

  Finally, Philip looked up at me. “You say you want me to go with you to Langa Langa? I’ll go. Yes, I’ll go.”

  I was too horrified to speak. Veronica studied the floor. Philip assured me that four days would be more than enough time for the shark boss to produce his shark.

  Our plane did not leave for Auki that evening. The pilot had disappeared. The following morning, I returned to the airport with Philip. A Twin Otter was waiting on the tarmac, but still no pilot. We caught a cab back to the pilot’s house to wake him up, but in our absence, another pilot arrived at the airport and flew our Twin Otter to New Georgia. I could feel the hours, my shark hours, rushing past me. The sun crept across the sky. The heat was not like heat at all. It was more like a great weight pressing down from the sky and squeezing you until you oozed fatigue and sweat like honey from a sponge. My skin itched. I could feel the previous day’s SolBrew seeping through my pores. I swore at some people in the departure lounge. Philip swore, too. He told the air agents we were on an important mission. Then he asked me for some spending money so he could buy a carton of cigarettes for his in-laws in Langa Langa. He smoked those cigarettes as we sat in the betel-stained terminal.

  “I have three days now, and I’m running out of money. Maybe God doesn’t want me to go to Langa Langa,” I said.

  Philip pawed my shoulder and gave a phlegmatic chuckle.

  “If we had just taken the boat, we would have reached Malaita by now,” he said.

  In the afternoon, by stunning coincidence, both a pilot and a plane appeared on the runway. The plane was an Islander, which was a step down from the usual Twin Otter: more like a go-cart with wings. There was room for six of us. From my front-row seat, I gazed down over the pilot’s shoulder at the cockpit, which resembled the console of my brother’s 1968 VW Bug, in that it seemed to be held together by a collage of duct tape. But the plane f
lew well enough. A half-hour later we skidded to a halt on a grassy corner of Malaita, and a half-hour after that Philip was leading me through the market to Auki Harbor, where I had landed on the Kopuria three weeks before. We headed for the rubble jetty where the saltwater people landed their boats. We bartered for space on a fiberglass kanu with ten other people and their groceries. We headed down the coast at a walking pace, pushed by a twenty-five-horse outboard, which screamed in protest.

  The Langa Langa Lagoon began just south of Auki, and stretched for twenty miles along Malaita’s mountainous west coast. Its surface was absolutely calm, protected from the chop of the strait by a string of reefs. Gnarled chunks of storm-tossed coral poked out of the sea like rotten teeth. Mangroves covered the shallows, their roots splayed above the water like the bare legs of so many thousand old women, leafy skirts hauled up past knotted knees.

  The saltwater people must have wanted very badly to live away from Malaita. In the absence of natural islands, they had built their own from rocks dredged from the sea bottom. There were dozens of artificial islands. Here was a pedestal with barely enough room for one shack. There, an abrupt plateau the size of a baseball field, rising head-high above the tide line and brimming with bungalows and palm trees. There were docks and long piers. There was a soccer pitch! It was a rough-edged Venice, all fashioned from the bones of the reef.

  Why did the saltwater people go to all this work when dry land lay a half-hour paddle away? Some say they fled the hills because they weren’t tough enough to defend themselves from the Kwaio warlords. The other, equally compelling reason was that there were no mosquitoes out on the lagoon.

  We zigzagged from wall to craggy wall so passengers could leap across the murk to their villages. Nearly every island had a cathedral-sized barn in which rose the frame of a half-finished ship. The saltwater people were the Solomons’ boat builders; half the wooden ferries that chugged in and out of Honiara were born on the shores of Langa Langa. But now, with Jimmy Rasta’s boys terrorizing the sound, nobody was in any hurry to finish a ship, so the half-completed craft languished like the skeletons of beached whales, their great beams and ribs bleached as white as bone from years of waiting.