I was speechless for a moment with horrified comprehension. Then I asked, “Nobody knew about the vinegaroon but us, right?” I took the cap from him and put that and the pill bottle in my pocket. I tried to think, but I wanted to cry.
“It’ll be okay, Ivan,” I said, although I knew it wouldn’t be. “It was an accident. We’re just little boys.” But what I felt was that we were something else now, yawing away from our innocent earthly lives, a dark unknown before us.
“We have to go bury the bottle, okay?”
“Okay.” He wiped snot and tears from his face with his T-shirt.
With new alarm I realized that the vinegaroon might still be on Ivan’s porch, or in his yard somewhere, and could bite somebody else. We needed to go over to the Goncharoffs’ and find him, but the police were surely still there. Not to mention Josef.
“Please don’t cry, Ivan,” I said. “Let’s drink our milk, and then maybe we can go look for him. I bet he’s hiding under some rocks, and he won’t come out in the day. Nobody knows about him. But we’ve got to find him.” It dawned on me that if the police found the vinegaroon, the Heist would be exposed as well.
Our doorbell rang, and Brickie went to open it. The cop and the detective who’d spoken to us on the Goncharoffs’ porch came in. They began talking softly with Brickie, but I couldn’t hear what they said, and tried to ignore them. Brickie ushered the men into the living room and introduced them, and I jumped up to shake their hands, hoping they’d think we were good boys. Ivan just stared at the TV, but he had a good excuse for forgetting his manners. “They’d like to talk to you boys for a few minutes,” Brickie said.
“Okay.” I prayed that Ivan wouldn’t fall apart.
The detective said to him, “I’m so sorry for your loss, son. I know you were very close to your aunt.” Ivan tried to smile a little. “We just want to understand what happened to her. Did you know about her asthma?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you seen her have an attack?”
“Yeah. Lots of times.”
“What did she do when she had one of these attacks?” He was writing things down.
“She…she coughed a lot. She had an inhaler,” Ivan said. “And some pills.”
“Do you know what kind of pills she had? Do you know if she had the pills and inhaler with her last night?”
Ivan thought. “No. But she usually had that stuff in the sleeve of her robe.” The detective nodded, scribbling.
I spoke up. “The pills were Miltowns. All ladies have them.”
“Okay,” the detective said, suppressing a smile. He looked to the policeman.
The cop asked, “Do you know anything about the bruises on her face and arm?”
Ivan and I looked at each other. It suddenly came to me that if Ivan incriminated Josef, and Josef went to jail, what would happen to Ivan? Had Ivan thought of that?
Ivan said hesitantly, “Yeah, she told us she hit her face on the swing. Last week. She said one of our dogs jumped up on the swing and made it happen.”
“Okay. Do you think there might be anyone who’d want to harm your aunt?”
In a rush I said, “There’s a kid we call Slutcheon. He didn’t like her because she was helping refugees, and some of them lived in his neighborhood, on Quincy Street, and his dad wanted to get rid of them.” Here Brickie’s eyebrows went up.
Ivan nodded, adding, “The girl next door hates her because her boyfriend has a crush on her.”
The detective, scribbling, asked, “Do you know anything about any of the men your aunt dated? How about the guy who picked her up on a motorcycle yesterday at the party?”
“I never saw him before, I don’t think,” Ivan said. “Sometimes when she came home with guys, I was asleep, or it was too dark to see who they were.” Then, to my horror, he blurted out, “Sometimes she got into fights with my father.”
The detective looked interested. “Some of the neighbors have mentioned that. But would you say that these…fights were anything other than sort of normal family arguments?”
“He…he might have slapped her,” Ivan said. “He didn’t like her dates, but I’m not sure why.”
“Okay.” The detective wrote that down. “I think that’s about it. Thank you, boys.” He put his notepad in a back pocket. The men went to the door with Brickie, where they talked for another minute and left.
My grandfather came back to us and asked, “You boys all right?” We nodded. Brickie looked at us for a long moment. “Okay. We can talk about this later. As you were, then.”
When he was gone, I cried, “You shouldn’t have said anything about Josef!”
“He said the neighbors told him anyway. And he deserves to go to jail.”
“But Ivan, if your dad goes to jail, what will happen to you?”
He thought, then shrugged. “I guess I’ll go to an orphanage. Who cares, as long as I’m away from him.”
I was still very concerned about the missing vinegaroon, but more cars had arrived at the Goncharoffs’, so we had to wait. Estelle surprised us with potato-chip sandwiches and Cokes. “Don’t be gettin’ the idea that you boys gonna get these from me again,” she said. They were especially delicious, a little spicy, and she told us that she’d put some crumbled bacon and a splash of Tabasco in the Miracle Whip, “Give it a little pep, don’t y’all think?” She gave Ivan’s burr head another affectionate rub. “I hear yo party was a great success. I’m proud o’ you boys.”
I said bleakly, “It was fun. But now everything’s ruined.”
“Well, we cain’t always understand God’s ’tentions, but you boys gone be all right.”
Ivan ate his whole sandwich. Exhausted, we fell asleep on the sofa for a short while. When I woke, I felt normal until I remembered everything. Ivan was already awake and said, “I hoped I’d wake up and it’d all be just a nightmare.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
The pill bottle felt like it was the size of a Coke in my pocket, and a strong sense of purpose took hold of me. “We can’t look for the vinegaroon yet, but we’ve got to go bury the pill bottle,” I said firmly. “Right now.”
We passed through the kitchen, where Dimma was sitting, doing her crossword puzzle. She looked up and said, blowing some Chesterfield smoke sideways, “Did you have a nice nap? I know you both needed one.” She smiled gently at Ivan. “Wasn’t that sweet of Estelle to fix your favorite sandwiches?” He nodded.
“We’re going to dig up some worms. Max’s snake needs them,” I said.
We headed out the kitchen door to the backyard and looked around. “Let’s bury it in the fountain.” My mother’s Lady of the Lake looked extra sad without any petunias, and I thought of my mother, and whether she’d understand what we were doing, and what we’d done. I got a shovel from the basement and began digging, going deep into the grass and dirt, soft after yesterday’s wild rainstorm. Ivan sat on the flagstones around the old pond and watched blankly. After digging down about two feet, I pulled out the green pill bottle, capped it, and threw it into its grave.
As I began filling in the hole, Max appeared, home from school. He looked anxiously at Ivan, and went and sat with him. “I brought you this.” He handed Ivan the new Flash comic book. Ivan smiled and thanked him but didn’t open it.
“What are you guys doing?”
I took a big breath and answered, “The vinegaroon got out on Ivan’s porch last night, and we’re burying his pill bottle because it smelled like vinegar and we don’t want anybody to know we stole it.” I hated to have to give words to the awful story. I stopped what I was doing, leaning on the shovel like a gravedigger. Max looked from one of us to the other, trying to digest this.