* * *
It wasn't a no.
The next Saturday, after the Knights had gone, Russ didn't leave. He sat on his perch in the pit of lane two for a long time with his feet dangling, and Wally sat on his, and the room was quiet except for the furnace ticking somewhere in the walls.
"Hey," Russ said finally, through the partition. "You wanna set for me?"
It was strange, looking up the long dark lane at Russ standing there in his old Bantam shoes, which were too small now, so he'd cut the toes open with a knife. Russ held a fourteen-pound house ball. He stood at the line for a long time.
Then he threw it like he was mad at it.
It came down the lane like a cannonball and hit the head pin dead full and the pins went everywhere, slamming into the curtain, one of them smacking the partition next to Wally's face, and when the noise stopped there were four pins still standing, scattered, the way they looked when someone had hit them hard and wrong.
Russ threw the second ball even harder. It got two of them.
He threw ten frames like that. He got a one hundred and four. By the end of it he was breathing like he'd run up a hill and his face was red and shiny, and when the last ball came down he didn't wait to see what happened. He just turned around and sat down on the bench with his back to the lane.
Wally climbed out of the pit. He walked down the side of the lane, the way Augie did, careful of the approach, and stood near the end of the bench.
"You come in high," Wally said.
Russ didn't look at him.
"Every time. You hit the head pin too full. That's what you told me about Feliks, remember? Too much on the head pin and it goes straight back. You do it every time, 'cause you throw it so hard it can't curve." Wally hesitated. "From the back it looks like you're trying to hurt them."
"They're pins," Russ said. "They don't care."