The Shark God (28 page)

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 flew 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.

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 cook
house. 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 collapsing 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?
”