Juicy

As in:

The next to last chapter in the Diablo Heights mango would be written by the Tyler brothers. To say it irked them that the famous flying Rios Brothers (who, as the name suggests, first demonstrated their nerves on rope swings hung from the high limbs of Monkey ear trees) had gotten the drop on them the year before could only put it mildly. Patrick had not only taken an over-ripe mango to the left side of his head, but had spent subsequent hours swabbing pieces of mango pulp out of his ear. It was humiliating. The collateral splatter had ruined a really nice Aerosmith t-shirt.

Through no fault of the Tyler brothers, the wooden, stilted eight-family dwelling they presumed to defend had been built at the foot of the hill, beneath the ammunition strung mango trees on the slope above. Heck, you just needed to get a mango-missile started in the air and it would smash against one of the Tylers’ trash can lid shields with the force of a juicy comet, exploding in a yellow corona of juice and pulp. The fruity carnage would be enough to deeply offend the senses of any connoisseur with a taste for expensive tropical produce. Something had to be done to offset the Rios’s advantage in controlling the high ground.

So two ideas emerged from the Tyler’s shop. The first was a heavy duty sling shot fashioned from rubber tubing and an eighteen inch steel fork recovered from a scrap pile near the boat yard. It not only worked with mangos, but Lee Tyler had successfully launched a large, rotting avocado nearly a hundred yards–upslope no less–with the device. So this, by itself, might prove to be an equalizer.

But Patrick also wanted a cannon–fashioned from aluminum tennis ball cans and propelled by lighter fluid–that he could use with over-ripe mangos to eject a fountain of what he called “mango magma.” It would be a properly horrifying thing if it worked. But it didn’t. The botched test launch had ruptured the cannon and left a slurry of mango pulp throughout the laundry area under the eight family.

When the Rios brothers heard about the failure on the Tyler’s launch pad they savored the news and proceeded to sow the rivalry with biting humor.

“Oh look,” the younger Rios brother commented from the back seat of the crowded school bus when it approached the Tyler brothers’ stop. “There’s Wernher von Mango.”