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Show Acting Alone Page 469 wanted to appear to be who he really was. He had been waving around in every face within arm's length a turquoise rectangle of paper, which he identified in a grand voice as a "special gift for a special boy on a special day": a giant publisher's advance check for Sammy. The paper bore six or seven figures, Polly didn't really notice how many; she probably wouldn't be able abstractly to distinguish between such huge and unreal numbers even if she cared to. So much money out of poor mothers' hands. She'd do what she could to see that it got put back where it belonged. The old man suddenly sobered, retracted the check, paled as in horror and began to writhe and get crispy around the edges like a night-crawler or an earthworm on a hot sidewalk, for unknown but not unimaginable reasons, when he saw that he was surrounded at either elbow in the cracked and blackened pew by two immaculately clean-cut, robot-like, uninvited, but not necessarily unwelcome young men in dark three piece suits. They had ridden up the steep incline of Cheyenne Mountain rather improbably and impressively on their one-speed bikes. One could not imagine why such healthy, handsome, wholesome pew-mates would cause an author's representative to shudder and sweat so. He looked as though his best friend had just died, or as though his own father had brutally abused or forsaken him. Polly noticed for the first time how incredibly old Sammy's agent was. He looked dead as dirt already, as he crumpled to his knees to pray among the splintery hymnal racks. Yes, these novelists, as opposed to sneaky plotting people of other, less justifiable varieties, have excellent minds for these kinds of things; and her Sammy could cook up a rather devilishly devious ruse of his own, if |