Augie was right; you could hear it. A ball on old wood made a deep low rolling noise that got louder and louder, like a train coming into a tunnel, and then there was a crash so loud it seemed to happen inside your own chest, and pins came flying back into the pit like startled birds, and one of them bounced off the padded curtain and thumped against the side of the perch six inches from Wally's ankle. Wally yelped and yanked his feet up so hard he nearly fell off the back.
From up at the foul line, sixty feet away, seven old men cheered.
"That's it!" yelled Hank. "Now you're learning!"
He learned. It took him most of that first Saturday to learn to load the rack without dropping pins, and to clear the deadwood without knocking over the pins that were still standing, and to get his feet up in time, and to roll the ball back on the wooden return rail along the side of the lane hard enough that it made it all the way to the bowler but not so hard that it shot off the end and into Stosh Wojcik's cardigan. By noon his hands were black with old lane oil and pin dust and his arms ached from lifting and his ears rang. The Knights tipped him a dime a line, the way pinboys had been tipped in 1940, and he went home with a dollar ninety in his pocket and fell asleep on the couch before Star Search came on.
Russ made a dollar forty. Russ was slower. Russ dropped pins, and swore when he dropped them, and on the third line he forgot to lift his feet and a pin caught him across the shin, and he howled and hopped around in the pit, and from the foul line Hank Lisowski called out, "Nineteen forty-nine!" and the Knights all laughed. Russ climbed back up on his perch with his face like a fist and did not say anything for the rest of the morning.
When they were leaving, Wally passed him at the bottom of the stairs. Russ was sitting on the bottom step, rolling up his jeans to look at the bruise, which was coming up red and angry on his shin. The other bruise, the one on his cheek, had gone a shade greener since morning.
"What," Russ said, without looking up.
"Nothing."
"So keep walking."
Wally kept walking.
* * *
There was something about the view from the back.
He did not notice it right away. For the first couple of Saturdays he was too busy trying not to get his legs broken. But by the third Saturday he could load the rack in fifteen seconds and get his feet up while the ball was still on the arrows, and that left him time, sitting on the perch in the half-dark with his knees up by his chin, to watch.
From the front, from the foul line, the pins were a wall. That was how they had always looked to him: ten white things packed together in a triangle, blocking the way, daring him. But from the back, from the pit, you could see them as they really were. You could see the spaces. There was room in there. Each pin stood on its own spot a foot from its neighbors, and when the ball came in, it did not knock them all down. It only touched four of them: the one in front, the one behind and to the side of that, and two more down the line. That was all. The ball went through the triangle like a hand through a curtain, and the pins it hit knocked down the others, pin into pin into pin, like a rumor going around a lunchroom.
The good bowlers, the ones who struck, always hit the same place, a little off center, between the front pin and the one beside it. Augie called it the pocket. When the ball came into the pocket at the right angle you could hear it, a sharp clean crack instead of a thud, and the pins all went down together as if they had agreed to it beforehand. When it came in wrong, too straight, too full, too thin, there was always some pin left standing in the back, rocking a little, like it had been somehow spared.