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Show 234 They were tracting one night through a raw suburb with streets still unpaved and whose houses-Korean war vintage-had been built on a landfill and started to settle crookedly. Their only amusement when the tracting was going badly was to invent professions and characteristics to fit the people who had closed the door in their faces. Tonight they had been turned away successively by a pharmaceutical salesman with a nose like a potato, who had been accompanied by a German shepherd that slunk away when it saw them standing in the doorway holding attache cases; by a crew-cut pipe-smoking architect whose wife made her own dentures at the kitchen table; a plump Vn'dow with sprayed-gold hair who worked days as a chiropractor's receptionist and played the organ at night in a cocktail lounge; a physicist who had mistakenly bought a twenty-thousand-dollar house in a neighborhood of eleven-thousand-dollar ones and whose wife gave him stomach aches; the manager of a local Baskin-Robbins, where business was slack during the cold weather; an elderly widow who did her own yard work wearing heavy gloves and drank beer in the kitchen with the curtains drawn; a jeweler with a grey unhealthy face and a southern accent who painted his own murals on his walls and always refused a drink at parties because it would not look right for a watchmaker's hands to shake in the mornings. Somewhere in that cross-section there should have been the combination of attributes that would at least have let them get past their first sentence. The law of averages alone should have seen to that. They were by now weary, heartsore and discouraged. The night was cold, streetlights hadn't been installed in this suburb yet, hard grainy snow whipped around their ankles, and the lights of the houses they had left and those that still lay ahead glowed in warm mockery on both sides of the quiet street. They were about to trudge back to Sorenson's car and go home, when they noticed |