“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.