Augie took him upstairs on a Tuesday in December, to watch.
"Your mother said okay," Augie said. "Your mother said okay till nine and if you're not home by nine-fifteen she's coming down here with the rolling pin, and I believe her. Sit. Watch. Don't talk."
Tuesday night was men's league night at Pulaski Lanes, and it was nothing like the Cellar on a Saturday morning. Every lane was full. The air over the lanes was so thick with cigarette smoke that the overhead lights made long blue cones in it, and the overhead projectors at the end of each lane threw the scores up on the screens in grease pencil, and men in shirts with their team names on the back, SCHMITT'S AUTO BODY and PRZYBYLSKI FUNERAL HOME and THE BLATZ BOMBERS and PETE'S ROOFING - WE'RE ON TOP, yelled and swore and slapped each other on the back and threw sixteen-pound balls down the lanes so hard the whole floor shook.
Wally sat behind the shoe counter on a stool next to Lorraine, who gave him a basket of cheese curds and a Squirt and told him that if he got grease on the counter she'd skin him, and he watched lane four.
Ron Kubiak was easy to find. He was the biggest man on Schmitt's Auto Body and the loudest, a huge, thick, handsome man going soft in the middle, with Russ's jaw and a mustache that had finished coming in a long time ago, and he threw the ball the way Augie had said, like he was mad at it. When he didn't strike he cursed so loud that people on lane twelve turned around, and once he drank straight out of a pitcher of Pabst while his teammates laughed.
Russ was there.
Wally didn't see him at first. Russ was at the far end of the bench behind lane four, sitting the way Wally had sat once, on the end, small. He wasn't wearing the Brewers jacket. He was wearing a sweatshirt that was too big for him and he was keeping score.
That was his job. Russ wrote the numbers on the projector sheet in grease pencil, and they appeared ten feet tall above the lane, and if he did the math wrong his father noticed, every time, and said something, and the men laughed. Wally couldn't hear what. He could hear the laugh.
"Why's Russ doing the scores?" Wally asked Lorraine.
Lorraine had a beehive that had not changed since 1962 and a voice like a cement mixer. She looked over at lane four and her mouth went thin.
"Because Ronnie doesn't leave him home alone at night," she said. "Which I'll give him. That's one thing." She put a fresh basket of curds on the counter that Wally hadn't asked for. "Eat."
At eight-thirty Schmitt's lost the third game to the Blatz Bombers by eleven pins. Ron Kubiak had left a split in the tenth frame, the six and the seven, the two pins on opposite corners, and missed both of them, and the Blatz Bombers had cheered. Ron sat down on the bench very hard, and then he got up and went to the bar, and when he came back he had a shot and a beer, and he drank the shot standing up in front of the scoring table and looked down at the projector sheet.
"What's this?" he said. Wally heard that one; the whole lane heard it. "That's a seven. That's not a nine. I had a seven in the fourth."
"You had a nine," Russ said. "You picked up the—"