Pulaski Lanes was upstairs from a tavern on Lincoln Avenue, and you could smell it before you could see it: beer and floor wax, fried cheese curds, Pall Malls, and the sharp lemon disinfectant that Lorraine Brzezinski sprayed into every rental shoe as if she was killing something that lived in there. Sixteen lanes of maple and pine, the wood gone the color of honey under thirty years of lane dressing. Brunswick A-2 pinsetters clanked and sighed behind the masking units, which were painted with a Polish eagle holding a bowling ball in its talons, because Augie Brzezinski had paid the sign painter in beer.
Wally Nowicki climbed the stairs behind thirty-one other seventh graders from Kosciuszko Middle School on a gray Thursday in October of 1984, carrying a brown grocery sack against his chest like it was full of eggs.
"Nowicki." Mr. Pfaff, who taught social studies and wore the same corduroy sport coat every day of the year, held out a clipboard. "Shoe size."
"I b-brought my own."
Mr. Pfaff looked at the grocery sack. He looked at Wally. He had the face of a man who had chaperoned a great many field trips and had learned to pick his battles. "Fine. Lane nine. You're with Kubiak, Dombrowski, and the Lisowski girl."
Of course he was with Kubiak.
Russ Kubiak was already at lane nine, sitting on the molded orange bench with his legs spread wide and his arms along the backrest, as if he had been born there and had just been waiting for everyone else to show up. He was a head taller than any boy in seventh grade and had a mustache coming in, a faint brown smudge he touched when he thought no one was looking. He wore a Brewers jacket with HARVEY'S WALLBANGERS stitched across the back, left over from the World Series two years before, the one they'd lost to St. Louis in seven, and he wore it like the Brewers had won.
"Wally-Wally-Wally," Russ said. "Wally Wallbanger. Wally Wall-flower."
Danny Dombrowski laughed, because Danny laughed at everything Russ said. Debbie Lisowski rolled her eyes and went to look for a ball.
Wally sat at the far end of the bench and opened the sack.
The shoes were black and white, two-tone Dexters with the leather gone soft and creased across the toe like the palm of an old hand. They were size ten and a half. Wally wore a seven. That morning he had stuffed a wad of toilet paper into each toe and worn two pairs of his father's tube socks, the ones with the red and blue stripes at the top, so his feet wouldn't slide around. They slid around anyway. He laced them as tight as the laces would go, double-knotted them, and stood up. They felt like boats. They felt like standing in two small, sturdy rowboats.
"What are those?" Russ said.
Wally didn't answer. He went to the ball rack.
The house balls at Pulaski Lanes were hard rubber, black or maroon or a swirly green that Augie called "the Lime Rickey," and every one of them had a number stamped by the finger holes to tell you the weight. Wally picked a ten-pound maroon one. His father had thrown a sixteen-pound Brunswick Black Beauty that he kept in a bag with a broken zipper in the front closet, and which nobody had touched in two years, and which was still there.
He put his fingers in the holes. The holes were too big. They were always too big.