While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [3]
Jenny and George went from appliance dealer to appliance dealer all over the United States and Canada. They would dance and sing and crack jokes until they’d collected a good crowd in a store. Then they would make a strong sales pitch for all the GHA appliances standing around doing nothing.
Jenny and George had been at it since 1934. George was sixty-four years old when I got out of college and joined the company. When I heard about George’s big paycheck and his free way of life and the way he made people laugh and buy appliances, why I guessed he was the happiest man in the company.
But I never got to see Jenny and George until I got transferred out to the Indianapolis offices. One morning out there we got a telegram saying Jenny and George were in our neck of the woods somewhere—and would we please find them and tell George his ex-wife was very sick? She wasn’t expected to live. She wanted to see him.
I was very surprised to hear he’d had a wife. But some of the older people in the office knew about her. George had only lived with her for six months—and then he’d hit the road with Jenny. His ex-wife’s name was Nancy. Nancy had turned right around and married his best friend.
I got the job of tracking Jenny and George down. The company never knew exactly where they were. George made his own schedule. The company gave him his head. They just kept rough track of him by his expense accounts and by rave letters they’d get from distributors and dealers.
And almost every rave letter told about some new stunt that Jenny’d done, that Jenny’d never been able to do before. George couldn’t leave her alone. He tinkered with her every spare minute, as though his life depended on making Jenny as human as possible.
I called our distributor for central Indiana, Hal Flourish. I asked him if he knew where Jenny and George were. He laughed to beat the band and said he sure did. Jenny and George were right in Indianapolis, he said. They were out at the Hoosier Appliance Mart. He told me Jenny and George had stopped early morning traffic by taking a walk down North Meridian Street.
“She had on a new hat and a corsage and a yellow dress,” he said. “And George was all dolled up in his soup and fish and yellow spats and a cane. You would of died. And you know how he’s got her fixed up now, so’s he knows when her battery’s running down?”
“Nossir,” I said.
“She yawns,” he said, “and her eyelids get all droopy.”
Jenny and George were starting their first show of the day when I got out to the Hoosier Appliance Mart. It was a swell morning. George was on the sidewalk in the sunshine, leaning on the fender of the moving van that had Jenny’s brains in it. He and Jenny were singing a duet. They were singing the “Indian Love Call.” They were pretty good. George would sing, “I’ll be calling you-hoo,” in a gravel baritone. Then Jenny would answer back from the doorway of the Mart in a thin, girlish soprano.
Sully Harris, who owned the Mart, was standing by Jenny with one arm draped over her. He was smoking a cigar and counting the house.
George had on the dress suit and yellow spats Hal Flourish had laughed so hard about. George’s coattails dragged on the ground. His white vest was buttoned down around his knees. His shirt bosom was rolled up under his chin like a window blind. And he had on trick shoes that looked like bare feet the size of canoe paddles. The toenails were painted fire-engine red.
But Hal Flourish is the kind of man who thinks anything that’s supposed to be funny is funny. George wasn’t funny if you looked at him closely. And I had to look at him closely because I wasn’t there for a good time. I was bringing him sad news. I looked at him closely, and I saw a small man getting on in years and all alone in this vale of tears. I saw a small