"What kind of emergency?" his mother said, in the car.
"A bowling emergency," said Busia, from the back seat, with dignity.
They were plain black Brunswicks, size seven, with the leather slide sole on the right foot instead of the left. The man at Ray's, who was Ray, had to order them special from Chicago because nobody in Milwaukee stocked lefty shoes in boys' sizes, and when they came in a week later Wally put them on in the store and walked up and down the carpet in front of the ball wall and could not stop looking at his feet.
"Good fit?" said Ray.
"They're my size," Wally said, like that was an amazing thing, and Ray, who had seen a lot of kids try on their first real shoes, nodded as if it was.
That night he took his father's shoes out of the grocery sack for the last time. He cleaned the grease off the white leather as well as he could with a toothbrush and some of his mother's Ivory soap, and he couldn't get all of it, and he decided that was okay. He took the toilet paper out of the toes. He found a new lace at the Woolworth's on Mitchell Street for thirty-nine cents to replace the one the machine had chewed. Then he put them in the closet, next to the Black Beauty in its bag with the broken zipper, side by side, toes facing out, and he closed the door.
He stood there a while, in front of the closet. Nobody came to tell him to go to bed. Later he heard his mother in the hall, stopping outside his door for a second, and then going on.
* * *
He practiced.
He practiced on Saturdays in the Cellar with the blue Ebonite, while Augie sat on the bench and drank Squirt and occasionally said "Your elbow" or, once, after a ball that went into the gutter so fast it seemed to be fleeing the scene, "Well, that was a choice." He practiced Wednesdays upstairs on lane sixteen, free, as long as he cleaned the ball returns after. He practiced in his bedroom, without a ball, sliding on the wood floor in his socks until Busia banged on the ceiling below with a broom handle and yelled up at him in Polish that she was trying to watch Wheel of Fortune.
Three steps, low, his right foot sliding out under him on that new leather sole. His left arm swinging close, so close his knuckles nearly brushed the floor. And at the bottom, the release, which Augie said he couldn't teach and didn't want to: a little twist of the wrist, a turn of the fingers, the same thing he had done to the shoe without knowing it. The ball came off his hand spinning. Not much at first. Then more.
By the second week of November, it had started to curve.
By Thanksgiving it curved every time, a long slow arc that started on the right side of the lane and swept back to the left at the end like a question being answered. He still missed a lot. He still left the seven pin, and Augie made him shoot at the seven pin over and over, a hundred times on a Wednesday afternoon, until his arm felt like rope. But he hit things. He hit things every single time now. On the first Saturday of December, with only Augie and the Knights watching, he threw a ball that came into the pocket from the left side and hit it square, and he heard it from the foul line, that clean sharp crack he had heard so many times from the back, and all ten pins went down together like they'd agreed to it.
The Knights went crazy. Hank Lisowski stood up and waved his cane. Stosh Wojcik took off his cardigan and swung it over his head.