Michael Malone - Weebly

easy to love someone for his money as for other such
talents. It could buy the world, or at least rent it. But it
could not give him Luke Packer's youth or size, and it
could not change the past.
In the beginning, Sammy Smalter had not believed
that. As checks had come in, first small ones, than
larger, and finally ridiculously large, they had come like
passports permitting him to leave his life behind, to take
the vacation of vacating his past, the recreation of recreating
Samuel Smalter. On the stilts of that money he
had planned to step over the slights and jokes and selfcontempt
that had crippled his earlier years. He had
planned to climb so high he could not even see the
looks on faces below him. During those years, when
Dingleyans assumed he had gone to try his luck
elsewhere, Smalter had been more places in the world
than Cecil Hedgerow had ever longed for. He had seen
more heaps of marble ruins and chunks of gilded rocks,
more scaffolding left behind by the human race than
Tracy Canopy had ever heard of. He had bought longer
random nights, paid more for them, wasted more, lost
more, even hurled more futilely into the winds at the