HERE AND NOW

I DROVE PAST the old SunBlesst packinghouse today. Nothing left of it. Not one stick. Now there’s a bedroom store, a pet emporium, and a supermarket. Big and new. Moms and dads and kids everywhere. Pretty people, especially the moms. Young, with time to dream, wake up, and dream again.

I still have a piece of the flooring I tore off the SunBlesst packinghouse back in sixty-eight. When I was young. When I thought that what had happened there shouldn’t ever happen anywhere. When I thought it was up to me to put things right.

I’m made of that place-of the old wood and the rusted conveyors and the pigeons in the eaves and the sunlight slanting through the cracks. Of Janelle Vonn. Of everything that went down, there in October, 1968. Even made of the wind that blew that month, dry and hot off the desert, huffing across Orange County to the sea.

I have a piece of the picket fence from the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza, too. And a piece of rock that came not far from where Mercury 1 lifted off. And one of Charlie Manson’s guitar picks.

But those are different stories.

LATER I MET my brother Andy at the Fisherman’s Restaurant down in San Clemente. Late August. The day was bright as a brushfire, no clouds, sun flashing off the waves and tabletops. Andy looked at me like someone had hit him in the stomach.

“It’s about Janelle,” he said.

Janelle Vonn in the SunBlesst orange packinghouse in Tustin.

Thirty-six years ago, two brothers who didn’t look much alike, staring down at her and across at each other while the pigeons cooed and the wind blew through the old slats.

A different world then, different world now.

Same brothers. Andy stayed thin and wiry. Tough as a boiled owl. Me, I’ve filled out some, though I can still shiver the heavy bag in the sheriff’s gym.

San Clemente, and you have to think Nixon. The western White House, right up the road. I picture him walking down the beach with the Secret Service guys ahead and behind. Too many secrets and nobody but the seagulls to tell them to. Andy’s newspaper ran a cartoon of him once, after he’d been chased out of office, and the cartoon showed him walking the beach with a metal detector, looking for coins. Thought that was a funny one. I kind of liked Dick Nixon. Grew up just over the hill from us. He was tight with my old man and his Bircher friends for a while, used to come to the house back in the fifties when he was vice president and in the early sixties when he’d lost for governor. They’d sit around, drink scotch, make plans. Nixon had a way of making you feel important. It’s an old pol’s trick, I know. I even knew it then. In fifty-six I graduated from the L.A. Sheriff’s Academy and Dick Nixon sent me a note. The vice president. Nice handwriting. It’s still in my collection of things.

But that’s a different story, too.

“You don’t look so good, Andy,” I said.

Brothers and we still don’t look much alike. An old cop and an old reporter. There used to be four of us Becker boys. Raised some hell. Just three now.

I looked at Andy and I could see something different in his face.

“What gives?” I asked.

“Listen to me, Nick. Everything we thought about Janelle Vonn was wrong.”

1954

“BECAUSE THE VONNS are direct descendants of murderers, that’s why,” said David Becker. “One of their relatives got hung in Texas. And I saw Lenny Vonn bust a brick with his bare hands once. One chop. That’s exactly what he’ll do to Nick’s head. The Vonns are crazy.”

The Becker brothers. Four of them, walking down Holt Avenue in Tustin for a rumble. June and still light out, the sun stalled high above the groves like it didn’t want to come down. Air sweet and clean with the smell of oranges.

Nick was second oldest. He imagined Lenny Vonn’s hand crashing into his skull. Wondered how a skull compared to a brick. Nick was sixteen and strong, had played Tustin varsity football as a sophomore, started both ways. Not a talker.

Andy was the baby. Twelve, skinny, buck-toothed. He wasn’t officially a part of the rumble but figured there was no way Lenny Vonn could crush Nick’s skull. Nick was God.

David, the one who had seen Lenny Vonn break the brick with his hand, was eighteen. He was the oldest and smart but graceless and unformed.

“I’ll yank Casey Vonn’s head off and piss down his neck.” This from Clay, fifteen. He smiled at each of his brothers in turn, a clean, straight-toothed grin that was both knowing and mean.

Clay had gotten them into this. Grabbed dumb Casey Vonn’s new baseball cap and tossed it over the fence to the German shepherd that snarled and snapped and threw himself at the chain link every time the school kids came past. Clay laughed while the dog tore it to shreds. Told Casey he’d throw him over next time. Casey so dumb he believed it.

The next day at school Casey’s big brother Lenny shoved David hard against the lockers and said it was rumble time for what happened to Casey’s cap. Lenny was large and chinless, with an enormous Adam’s apple and sideburns like Elvis. Brothers, said Lenny, three-on-three, the packinghouse, no weapons. On David’s face, breath like coffee and cavities. David asked Lenny to forgive Clay, said he’d pay for a new hat. Lenny spit in David’s face.

The Becker brothers angled into one of the grove rows, walking along the irrigation ditch, clods of earth throwing them off-balance and doves whisking through the sky above them. Nick led the way.

“The Vonns got two sisters,” said Clay.

“Can they fight?” asked Andy.

“Maybe I’ll make out with them when we’re done beating up their brothers,” said Clay.

“They’re seven and five,” said David. He knew right from wrong and wrong angered him. He was going off to college in September. He stopped and shook out a Lucky Strike and tapped it on the side of his lighter. Nick saw his hands shaking.

“Gimme a cigarette,” said Clay.

David gave Clay the pack and lighter. He lit one and put another behind his ear.

“Me, too,” said Andy.

“No,” said Nick.

“I don’t want to do this,” said David. He coughed. He’d spent hours the night before praying for courage.

“Fine,” said Nick. “It’ll be me and Clay.”

“I can fight,” said Andy.

“No,” Nick and David both said.

Clay’s cigarette looked good so Nick plucked it out of his mouth and took a puff.

Nick saw by the look on his face that David didn’t want his baby brother to see him get his ass kicked.

“Keep your hands high,” Nick said. “If we stay back-to-back we’ll be all right.” Like there was a science to this kind of thing.

The SunBlesst packinghouse sat behind the railroad tracks in the middle of the grove. The tracks marked the city limits but everyone thought of the packinghouse as being in Tustin. It was a big wooden building with a metal roof and twenty-foot-high metal sliding doors that let the conveyors swing out to the freight cars. The wood was black with creosote. On one of the doors was a giant painting of one of the SunBlesst orange box labels. It showed a raven-haired beauty holding out a perfect navel orange and smiling. Behind her were rows of orange trees. The sky above the trees was indigo blue and the words California Girl charged out of it in bright yellow letters. Once someone had left a flatcar of labels outside and the Becker boys threw them into a Santa Ana wind that blew them all over town, onto the lawns and streets and school yards, and everywhere he went for a week Nick saw that pretty woman offering him an orange.