You could pick out the fields serviced by Beebot Inc. from the buzzing—but it wasn’t the buzz of insects that used to hum in hot fields. Instead it was the whir of tiny, high-speed motors: the tiny bee-drones that had been developed to pollinate crops after real bees died off in such numbers that markets couldn’t depend on them any longer. Sunlight glinted off their propellers as they worked an expansive cantaloupe field, their whisper rising to a whine as the motors momentarily ran faster to reposition the bee-drones, bringing each back to the blossom it had been pollinating when lifted away by a breeze. They outlined the leading edge of the gust the way a shiver runs through field grass, gently rising then falling like a sea full of corks riding leafy, green swells….
The cantaloupe fields down the road were silent—except for the occasional sound of Spanish. Or Bengali. Or Urdu. When José stood to give his aching back relief, he could look across rows of migrants bent to their task, working their way down the field of cantaloupe plants they had been hired to pollinate. He had heard myths of men being turned into horses, or women into spiders. But never had he imagined, back in Chiapas, that when he finally made it to California, he would become a bee. Thinking back now, though, it seemed as if he had been moving toward this fate from the start. Setting out alone one dawn, he was joined on the road by two, then eight other men just like him, and moving toward their destiny. By the time they reached the border their numbers had swelled into that of a swarm. Some died as fish trying to swim across; he was turned into a mule in exchange for the protection of the cartel that helped get him, or rather the cargo he carried, under that fake wall….
Now here he was, a bee. RedHatters blamed Mexicans for the bee die-off and there might be some truth in it—if prayers could kill. He kissed the crucifix hanging from his neck—for God, a benevolent God who knows the destiny of all, had obviously been making the bees in America die—just as He had set a plague of locust on Egypt. José dug among the broad green leafs, found a male blossom and plucked it, his hands too calloused to feel the velvety smoothness of their yellow petals as he rubbed the stamens into a female bloom. In three months a large cantaloupe would be ready to be picked and farms like this would need more men and women like him, and the poor, whom God loves most, would at least get a smell of honey….
Across the street, campesinos lined up at the same day-labor office that had hired him and hundreds of Aché Indians over six years ago. Now, flat on his back in the park across from it, Roque Samudio waited to be nailed to a cross. He closed his eyes against the brightness of the sky as the medicos used a cotton ball and alcohol—cold—to clean his palm. They had to scrub roughly because its creases were deep: a work-roughened map of the construction sites he had worked since running away as a teenager. He’d always thought that he and the millions of bricks that he must have hauled over his 60-some years were the same deep, rust red because they were both made of the same Paraguayan clay. But when the medicos finished cleaning his palm, it was shockingly white, as though they had managed to wipe away a stain. His original sin.
One of the medicos held up a syringe, tapping it. Roque closed his eyes. He winced at the pinch of the needle.
“Calmate, hermano, calmate.” It was Jacinto, whom he had grown up with, and gone to catechism with when the missionaries brought them into the village after their parents had been killed in the war for the forest. He wouldn’t be here today if not for Jacinto—and that Game&Watch they’d been given, out of pity he supposed, by some Russian engineers back when they were kids. They’d played it so much that Priest took it away, and Roque smiled to think how scared they’d been when, after stealing it back, they’d headed into the forest as porters for that woman scientist who’d come to their village. When they’d come upon that skinned monkey—the devil himself, they’d thought—they’d run away for
good: afraid of soldiers in the forest, afraid to go back to Priest. Decades later, here they were, still together, volunteering to be crucified in the hopes that it would shame Unicom, the company that had used them and hundreds of others to expand the Itaipu Dam, and then never paid them.
“Priest always said we are all Christ, but I don’t think he meant this, no?” Jacinto joked from his own crucifix, still playing the part of the older brother. “It’s not so bad.”
And in fact, it took Roque a moment to realize that the pounding that shook the cross he lay on was from the force of the doctor nailing his palm to its crossbeam.
When the medic moved to numb his other palm, Roque could see the workers who’d already taken a turn on the cross. Somos Los Paraguayos Que Hemos Construido La Usina de Itaipu, said one of their signs.
Roque smiled back weakly. Maybe they would all have to be crucified before anyone got paid. Maybe they would all just end up with holes in their hands. But the mayor was getting fed up with the sight of workers being crucified in the park and the tourists they attracted. Even now Roque could see a group of Japanese teenagers, posing before a phone at the end of a stick as they jostled to position themselves so that he on his cross would appear in the background of their group selfie.
A cantaloupe was a node, on a vine of othernodes that include chemical factories, the dance of bees, sunlight, microelectronics, rain, refugees,immigration laws, civil wars, and thousands of other factors, Andrew considered,standing in the field to observe his bee drones at work when a caravan of black buses rushed by on the highway beyond the fence. Prison-mesh windows. They were headed for Family Fresh Farm Inc. down the road. The illegal BBs who’d been pollinating their cantaloupes must
be finishing the job, and the owners of the farm must have reported them to ICE.
Andrew sighed. When he’d switched his pollination business over to beebots, he’d graphed their falling cost against the rising cost of real bees, which he’d had to work like migrants, hauling them from field to field across distances no natural bee would ever fly, and working them to exhaustion. He’d expected the lines to cross within two years. But he hadn’t factored in how many refugees would be willing to work like bees—always new swarms—like locusts—a force of nature itself—and not even Mother Nature could compete against labor costs of zero.
He could have bought into the NuNature franchise: the company that enclosed acres then pumped in a dense cloud of pollinating gas. But beebots had seemed so much more natural than a gas chamber. Organic. Just then, a bee-eating wasp, Philanthus, captured one of his beebots in its embrace right before him. As it tried to squeeze honey out of it, a praying mantis grabbed the wasp. The wasp continued to squeeze, refusing to let go of the drone, even as it was being eaten by the mantis, and the sight of the wasp treating a drone exactly as it would a real bee seemed a sign—delivered specifically to him—that God takes care of those who take care of The Garden, just as Rev. Jimmy said.