"I know."
"Then what's the problem?"
Wally thought about it. He didn't think about it the way he usually did, trying to figure out what to say so he wouldn't get hit. He just thought about it.
"I used to think the pins were, like, a wall," he said. "Like they were all ganged up on me. And then from back there you can see they're not. They're just standing there. They're not doing anything. It's only us."
Russ sat there. Then he put both of his hands over his face, and his shoulders went up and down once, twice, and Wally didn't know what to do, so he sat down on the other end of the bench and looked at the lane and didn't say anything. That seemed to be right. After a while Russ took his hands away, and wiped his face hard with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and stood up and went back to the approach.
"Get back in the pit, Nowicki," he said. His voice was thick. "I'm gonna throw it soft."
* * *
Ron Kubiak signed the entry form at the shoe counter on a Tuesday night without reading it. Augie put it in front of him with a pen and said, "For the kid," and Ron looked down at it, and up at Augie, and his face did a complicated thing.
"Russ is bowling again?"
"Russ is bowling again."
"Huh." Ron signed it. His signature was big and slanted, like it was trying to get off the page. "Waste of eight bucks. He chokes, Augie. He's always choked. Kid's got no ice in him."
"He's got some," said Augie.
"Where'd he get it? Not from me," Ron laughed, loud, and looked around for somebody to laugh with him, and the only person there was Lorraine, who looked back at him with a face like a closed door. Ron stopped laughing. He went back to lane four.
"Not from me," Lorraine said, when he was gone, in a voice that could have stripped paint. "That's the first true thing that man's said in this building since 1971."