California Girl

T. Jefferson Parker

California Girl

For Tyler and Thomas

Long may you run

1

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 Vo

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 Vo

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 fu

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 Vo

2

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 Le

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 Le

Andy was the baby. Twelve, ski

David, the one who had seen Le

“I’ll yank Casey Vo

Clay had gotten them into this. Grabbed dumb Casey Vo

The next day at school Casey’s big brother Le

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 Vo

“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.