Sugito, killed by a crocodile

Sugito, killed by a crocodile


　

　
He was born in a highlands village and given a name that people in the city could not pronounce. His grandfather was a warrior and had taken many heads. His grandfather’s father was also a "big man", famous for killing many enemies in feuds and hanging the skulls like gourds in his long-house. Several times, the Dutch put his great-grandfather in jail for homicide, although he was never imprisoned for very long – black fellows killed black fellows, revenge-murder was the law of nature. The skulls of enemies that his grandfather had taken were from Japanese soldiers. When Sugito was little, several times a year the old man decked himself in a headdress resplendent with the tail-feathers of bower birds and showed his grandson his trophy-skulls, hidden in hut deep in the jungle and made from canvas and metal peeled from crashed war planes.

His mother was Chinese and very gentle. She worked as a nurse in the clinic near the highlands village where her husband farmed and raised pigs. People were poor in highlands’ villages and the forests around them had been devastated by logging. Mines tore off the tops of mountains and the streams were red with poisons leached from the slag from the open pits. After awhile, no one could live in the hills anymore and, so, most of the people came down from the highlands to seek work in Sarong City. It was in the slums of that town that his boss, a fat Malaysian fishmonger, named the slender boy, Sugito and that was how he was called when the crocodile killed him.

Sugito was baptized Lutheran and he was married in a church in Sarong City. The wages paid by the fishmonger were insufficient to support his wife and family and, so, he took a job in a factory that made tofu. The factory was owned by a Japanese corporation but the supervisors were all men from Papua Barat. At first, Sugito worked in the granary unloading trucks laden with sacks heavy with soybeans. After a couple years, he hurt his back and couldn’t lift the 100 kilo bean sacks and, so, he was assigned lighter duty inside the steamy factory where the beans were boiled and the curds separated from the milk used to make tofu. The tofu curds or paste was pressed into blocks that a conveyor nudged into a stainless steel trough filled with cold water. Sugito’s job was to score the pressed cream-colored blocks of tofu with a cutting device, making a forty cubes of soybean curd from each block. He worked ten hours a day and made enough money to buy for himself a small, used motorbike. Sugito used the motorbike to travel to and from work. He lived in a tin-roofed house on the outskirts of a small village separated from Sarong City by a few miles of rice-paddies and some small palm-shaded pastures where cattle and swine were raised.

Sugito’s wife was sickly. She died after her second child, a son, was born. Sugito sent his two sons to Sarong City to a Lutheran boarding school. He wanted them to learn English and Chinese. If you could speak English, tourists bound for the World War Two wrecks in the harbor and, beyond, that the great coral reef required guides. People came to Sarong City from America and Europe where everyone spoke English and, of course, Australia. The garbage and mud in the City appalled the tourists but it was merely a way-station for the beaches on the archipelago beyond the harbor with its shoals of half-submerged destroyers and troop transports. The City fathers hoped to develop tourist attractions in Sarong – there was an unique pagoda downtown and some crocodile farming operations that allowed visitors to tour their breeding ponds, but the city was poor and chaotic and most Western visitors didn’t stay long. An ability to speak some Mandarin Chinese was a prerequisite to working at the big storage container facility located behind high barbed wire fences out on the cape. The place paid good wages and Sugito hoped that his sons might find employment there. All his life, he had struggled to find work and didn’t want his two boys to experience the poverty that he had suffered.

Except for holidays when his boys came back to the village, Sugito lived alone. He was too shy to be successful with women and his cheeks were pockmarked from a disease that had almost killed him when he was a baby and, so, he didn’t consider himself to be attractive in any way. He earned enough money to visit a prostitute with whom he was friendly a few times a month. At work, he was well-liked. He went to church every Sunday in the village by the tofu factory and served as a lay-pastor delivering the sacraments to people who were too sick to leave their homes.

In 2013, after much dispute in the city council, an Indian company opened a crocodile farm near the village. Sugito had never seen a live crocodile although, like everyone in Papua Barat, he had heard tales about monstrous reptiles gliding through the harbor shallows where people built their homes on stilts and snatching dogs and, even, full-grown pigs from their cages. When he was a little boy, Sugito’s grandfather showed him the ruin of a canoe that his clan had once owned – a long vessel hacked from a huge tree trunk with its prow carved like the fanged snout of a crocodile. The people in Sugito’s village didn’t want the crocodiles to live next to them, but the Indian businessman said that the animals would be confined behind a wall and that no one in town would ever see them. Further, the Indian businessman said that the crocodiles, raised for their skins that could be fashioned into handbags, would provide a source of revenue and employment for people in the village. When Sugito heard this, he shrugged: "I’m not interested in herding crocodiles." The village council licensed the operation and some earthmovers arrived to gouge-out some shallow pits where the reptiles could wallow. A stout wall of bricks more than six feet high was built around the crocodile farm. The wall was equipped with a mechanized gate and a sentry-house where an old man dressed in an army surplus soldier’s uniform drowsed away his days and nights, his AK-47 automatic rifle resting across his desk like a paper-weight. True to what the Indian businessman had said, no one could see the reptiles inside the enclosed acre of land, but people said that they could smell them – a thick, metallic odor that was veined with the stench of rotting carrion.

A truckdriver’s strike in Sarong City disabled the tofu factory. There was fighting in the streets and checkpoints halted traffic and the trucks that delivered soybeans to the factory were detained in the city. For a day or two, the workers at the factory cleaned the place, polishing the machines until they shined, and, then, there was nothing to do so the laborers were furloughed. The plant’s temporary closing was doubly inconvenient to Sugito. He lost wages, of course, but, also, was deprived of feed for his cattle – it was his custom to buy bags of soybean husks, a byproduct of producing tofu, as a feed-supplement to the grass on which his cattle grazed. It had been dry for several months and the trees were mostly denuded by hungry deer and the grass was mummy-brown and shriveled as if the nutrients had been roasted out of it. Sugito’s cows and his calf were gaunt and they bawled like hungry babies in the dusty pasture near his home.

Sugito sometimes drank in a local tavern with the security guard at the crocodile farm. The man told him that there was high green grass, bearded with seed, around the ponds where the reptiles lounged. He said that if Sugito bought him four or five rounds of drinks, he would look the other way when his friend slipped through the access gate to the crocodile breeding station. "Just be careful," the drunk and red-faced guard told Sugito. He added that at midday the crocodiles were lethargic, wallowing motionlessly on their pale bellies in the stinking mud, jaws wide-open to ventilate bellies full of chicken carcasses and frozen rats. "You can easily outrun them," he said.

The next day, a little after noon, Sugito took three burlap sacks and a box-cutter and went to the gate in the brick wall. He nodded to the security guard and, then, strolled into the enclosure. It was as the guard had described – the big reptiles looked sunstruck, resting like half-submerged logs in the shallow, algae-encrusted ponds. Small crocodiles, most of them the length of man’s thigh, crowded together, paving the mud with their corrugated, scaly backs. Sugito saw the man-made marshes fringed with chest-high stands of reeds and swamp-grass. The air was filthy with the stink of the beasts.

Sugito crouched in the high grass, slashing the reeds to make sheaves that he thrust into his burlap sacks. In a shallow, watery trench a couple yards away, a ten-foot crocodile was lounging in the ooze. The reptile smelled Sugito, shifted slightly sideways, and, then, rolled over thrashing its huge tail like a flyswatter against the man poaching the grass. Sugito was flung from the grass toward the lagoon where smaller crocodiles twisted and lunged toward him. The big crocodile scuttled toward Sugito and bit him in two. Several small crocodiles took his hands and feet in their jaws, and, corkscrewing, yanked his joints apart. Two men in a golf cart saw the reptiles tearing Sugito apart and drove to the place where the creatures were writhing around him. They beat the crocodiles with metal rods equipped with big sharp hooks and drove the animals back into the deeper water where they opened their jaws and hissed like snakes.

The authorities were called and the fragments of Sugito were collected in a khaki-green body bag. A couple days later, a Lutheran pastor said some words over the urn holding his cremated remains. The church was thronged with people and it was very hot and sticky in the sanctuary. Someone suggested that the crocodiles should be made to suffer for murdering Sugito. Others took up a chant denouncing the reptile farm. The church ladies had made some sandwiches and there were pies and brownies in the fellowship hall, but, when the service was over, no one went to partake of that food. Instead, the crowd surged out of the church and rampaged through the village streets, more and more people joining the parade to the crocodile breeding station. By the time the mob reached the reptile farm, the throng of young men at the head of the procession were all armed with hammers or baseball bats or iron bars and pipe sections. The guard who had admitted Sugito to the lagoons a few days earlier saw the throng approaching and ran from his station to where his Vespa was parked and, then, zoomed away. The mob smashed down the guard-house and broke the gate and, then, lassoed the crocodiles, yanking them out of the slimy water and clubbing them to death. The baby crocodiles were easy to kill: people picked them up by the tail and simply swung them overhead, smashing out their brains on the brick wall enclosing the reptile farm. The larger crocodiles, several of them as long as 12 feet, had to be muzzled by wrapping rope around their jaws. Then, crowds of men dragged the reptiles to a pit half-full of garbage, hacking at them with big machetes and claw-hammers. When the crocodiles died, they rolled onto their backs kicking their legs in spasms in the air. The bellies of the crocodiles were pale green, segmented and the color of early morning mist on the river.

The mob killed 292 crocodiles. The insurance claim submitted by the Indian businessman to his insuring underwriters at Lloyds of London was for than more $300,000 in American dollars. The police stood by idly and did nothing to stop the crocodile massacre. "We were outnumbered," they later said. The mob poured gasoline over the heap of mutilated crocodiles and lit them on fire. Many of the creatures were not yet dead and they writhed as the flames bit into them.