And it was nearly always the ten. Or the seven, for the Knights who threw it left-handed, which was two of them, Stosh and an old man named Feliks who never spoke. The pin at the corner. The one by itself.
"From the front it's ten pins," Wally said, on the fourth Saturday, mostly to himself. "From back here it's like, four."
From the other side of the partition, Russ said, "What?"
Wally hadn't known he was listening. "Nothing. Just. The ball only hits like four of 'em. The rest is the pins hitting each other."
There was a silence from the other perch.
"So?" Russ said.
"So nothing. I just never knew that."
Another silence. The ball came down lane two, Feliks's ball, curving in from the left side, and cracked into the pocket on the wrong side, and all of the pins went down except for one in the back corner that wobbled and stayed.
"Seven pin," said Russ, sounding personally annoyed about it. "Every time. He comes in too high."
"Too high?"
"Too much on the head pin. You come in high on the head pin, the pin goes straight back instead of sideways and it misses the corner." Russ jumped down to clear the deadwood. Wally heard him grunting. "Everybody knows that."
Wally hadn't known that. He sat on his perch and thought about it, and wondered how Russ knew, and what else Russ knew, and why Russ Kubiak, who could throw a fourteen-pound ball as hard as a car crash, had looked so unhappy every time he did it.
* * *
At noon on the fourth Saturday the Knights left, and Russ went up the stairs without saying goodbye, and Augie came down the lane with two bottles of Squirt, walking on the side of the approach the way you were supposed to, in his street shoes.
"Come out of there," he said. "Sit."