And from the pit, where he was on the perch alone that morning because Augie had moved Russ to lane one, Russ Kubiak looked out at him across sixty feet of lane, and Wally couldn't read his face at all in the dark.
* * *
Russ didn't talk about home.
At school he was the same as always, louder than everybody, mooing like a cow every time Mr. Pfaff turned to write on the board, but he had stopped bothering Wally. He didn't seem to have decided this; it was more like Wally had stopped being visible to him, which was so much better than the alternative that Wally didn't question it.
On Saturdays, in the Cellar, it was different. On Saturdays they were the only two people in the building under seventy except for Augie, who didn't count, and on Saturdays the long low room and the dark pit and the thunder of the balls made a kind of private country with its own rules. Russ still didn't talk about home. But other things came out.
That the bruise on his cheek had come from walking into a door. That his mom lived in Racine now with a guy named Gary who sold aluminum siding. That Russ had bowled in the junior league upstairs at Pulaski Lanes when he was nine and ten and eleven, that he'd had the high average in the Bantam division two years running, and then he'd quit.
"Why'd you quit?"
"Got boring."
The ball came down. Russ jumped down and cleared the deadwood and got back up on his perch.
"You were good, though," Wally said.
"I was okay." A pause. "My dad was good. You know he bowled on TV once? Same show as your dad. Bowling Party, Channel Six. Nineteen sixty-something. He was seventeen. He lost."
"I didn't know that."
"Yeah, well. He doesn't really talk about that one."
* * *