At 6:19 p.m. on April 12, 1968, Dr. Vincent R. Smith checked his brown-leather watch only to realize it had stopped at five. The adolescent courier had just left Smith’s office to deliver today’s medical documents and copies of memos to Estrella. Smith looked at the wall clock and realized there were less than ten minutes to hurry home for dinner.
The full moon peeked its head over the eastern mountains. Smith had purposely waited until twilight to leave, hoping to avoid the sun that shone today like a fat bulb in an oven. But a thick, soupy heat greeted him at the portal. Heading from his shanty office to the White Zone, Smith saw straggling plantation workers make their way to the liquor store or to the cantina on the edge of the grove. With no one around to protect them, the blue bags of banana bushels were poked full of holes by lollygagging toucans. A lingering hawk scooped one up for supper.
On Smith’s shirt, a pair of embarrassing, triangular sweat marks spread from his armpits, pointing down to the weight he had gained since being here. The toucans with mushy fruit in their mouths had a good laugh about it. On the way back to his bungalow, through the chain-link fence that divided the plantation from the White Zone, Smith studied at least a dozen of the men he’d called into his office this month. This week had been O to S. Next week’s appointments, T through Z. The laborers curled their fists into rocks when they lifted their heads and saw him.
Smith arrived home unscathed. Before Janet could call him into the kitchen for dinner, he sat on the comfortable bench in the foyer and picked up the phone to dial Washington. It was around half past eight on the East Coast, and Smith was unsure if his uncle would pick up on a Friday night.
“The caller you have reached is unavailable,” the operator said. He left a message.
Smith could no longer ignore it. Could no longer stand it. He knew that Nemagon was the true, notorious culprit here, and barrels upon barrels of it were being stowed in a shed, underneath thick tarps close to the mill. Smith watched daily as unwitting laborers sprayed the dirt with the nematicide that Dow Chemical had vowed to discontinue. Children were forced to stir the chemical in vats, with just sticks and their normal clothes on. T-shirts, shorts. Bare-handed. Barefoot. In almost every documented experiment, scientists found that high levels of exposure to Nemagon caused dramatic increases of male sterility in mammals. In rats, in rabbits, and now men.
At Dow’s very mention of discontinuation, the American Fruit Company threatened a lawsuit, so Nemagon still arrived in Costa Rica by the ton. The AFC refused to seek out an alternative, especially when one so cheap and effective had allowed them to outproduce both Standard Fruit and United Fruit for the last three fiscal quarters.
Smith tried his uncle once more. Again, the operator said, “The caller is unavailable.” Smith hung up. He would have to wait until Monday if he wanted to quit. Maybe the weekend would change his mind. He considered asking Janet her opinion, but then she might ask why he wanted to leave. He couldn’t bear to tell her why he had been sent here to Costa Rica.
To nullify the impending lawsuit from meddlesome Costa Rican lawyers, Smith’s uncle on the board asked him personally to come down here to cover up any evidence he could find. They built him a special bungalow in the center of the plantation. All the luxuries he was used to at home were provided: wine, a state-of-the-art air conditioner. Cuban cigars as a bonus.
For the past four months, Smith had tested the semen samples of every last male worker and found that, indeed, 76 percent of them were sterile. He had spent the last two weeks forging medical documents and coercing illiterate laborers to sign English-written consent forms. The workers, the documents showed, had agreed to be sterilized years ago. Finally, the AFC’s lawyers could argue convincingly that Nemagon had nothing to do with it.
Sitting in the bungalow’s foyer, Smith questioned why, with just a week or two left on his mission, he wanted to call Washington now to quit. It would all be over soon and he would take Janet to Europe. He could finally give her the Roman holiday she’d wanted since seeing the movie. But all of that seemed inconsequential today. Every future plan and every justification he could imagine for this evaporated like the water in flower vases around the house.
There was one man whose expression was singed into Smith’s brain. He had seen his own reflection in the man’s black eyes. According to his file, the man was father to two girls, and Smith had told him they weren’t his. The man sneered at him, had always sneered at Smith when he passed. Smith often smiled at workers to hide his motives, but that man, he had seen through Smith’s ruse from the very beginning, and it frightened him. In his office, Smith had looked down at his clipboard and saw that the man’s labs were indeed abnormal—discolored semen, deformed sperm—but certainly didn’t indicate sterility. But those eyes staring back at him forced his cruel hand. Bald-faced and anxious, Smith took a hammer to that man’s world and smashed it to bits within a matter of minutes. In mechanical Spanish and with scalpel-sharp teeth, he told the man he was sterile.
Smith had lied. His words sharpened by venom and loathing, Smith sterilized the man. Castrated him with the stroke of a pen.
Smith knew this culture’s obsession with masculinity, and being sterile was worse than being a woman. Worse than death. Smith taught the man a valuable lesson: to fight against him would always prove futile. Smith would always be who he was: a successful American doctor; and that man would always be who he was: a poor Costa Rican laborer.