"But how many times did you make him choose?" Jack asked her. "We followed him to Sweden, to Norway, to Finland, to the Netherlands. Mom--you gave up only because Australia was too fucking far!"
He should have watched his language, which may have seemed especially disrespectful to a dying woman--not that his mother had ever tolerated his use of the word fucking.
"You think you're so smart!" Alice snapped at him. "You don't know the half of it, Jack. We didn't follow him. I made your father follow us! He was the one who gave up," she said--softly but no less bitterly, as if her pride were still hurt more than she could bring herself to say.
Jack knew then that he knew nothing, and that the only questions she would ever answer were direct ones--and he would have to guess which direct questions were the right ones to ask. A hopeless task.
"You should talk to Leslie," his mother told him. "Leslie likes to talk. Tell her I don't care what she tells you, Jack."
"Mom, Leslie wasn't there."
He meant in Europe. But his mom wasn't paying attention; she was pushing buttons on her new CD player, seeking to drown him out with the usual music.
"I want to send your MRI to Maureen Yap," Jack told her. "She's an oncologist."
"Tell Leslie. She'll arrange it, Jack." The door to their conversation was closing once again--not that she'd ever opened it an inch more than she had to.
Jack tried one last time. "Maybe I should take a trip," he said. "I'll start with Copenhagen, where we began."
"Why not take Leslie with you, Jack? That'll keep her out of my hair."
"I think I'll go alone," Jack said.
His mom's exasperation with the CD player was growing. "Where's the remote?" he asked her. "You should use the remote, Mom."
Alice found the remote, pointing it at Jack--then at the CD player--like a gun. "Just do me a favor, Jackie boy," she said. "If you're going to go find him, do it after I'm gone."
The CD player was new, but Bob Dylan was familiar--albeit a lot louder than they expected.
The guilty undertaker sighs,
The lonesome organ grinder cries,
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.
"Jesus, turn it down!" Jack said, but his mother pushed the wrong button--not the volume. The song started over, at the beginning.
"Go find him after I'm gone," Alice said, pointing the remote at Jack--not at the stupid
CD player.
"I want to know what really happened! I've been asking you about the past, Mom. I don't know enough about him to know if I want to find him!"
"Well, if that's the trip you want to take, go on and take it," his mother told him, pointing the remote in the right direction and turning down the volume, though it was still too loud.
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn,
But it's not that way,
I wasn't born to lose you.
Thanks to Bob, they didn't hear the little tinkle of the bell as the door to the tattoo parlor swung open. It was warm and stuffy in the shop, but even after he closed the door, the gray-faced man in the doorway kept shivering; he had white shoulder-length hair, like an old hippie. There was a rising sun sewn on his jeans jacket, just above his heart, and he wore a red bandanna around his throat--Richard Harris as a cowboy, or perhaps an over-the-hill rodeo rider.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" Alice asked him.
The man was still too cold to talk, but he nodded. He wore tight black jeans and black-and-purple cowboy boots with a diamondback-rattlesnake pattern; he walked stiff-legged to the couch, which Jack knew was a sofa bed. (His mom occasionally slept there, Mrs. Oastler had told him--probably when Alice and Leslie had been quarreling.) The old cowboy sat down on the couch, as gingerly as you might imagine him settling himself on a bronco.