"Ronnie," Augie said quietly.
"Augie." Ron raised his cup. "Hey. Look at this. Second place. Who knew?"
Russ threw his ball. It was too hard. It came in high and left the five and the seven, and he picked up one of them.
"Come on!" Ron yelled. "Come on! Easy one!"
Russ didn't turn around. But every time he got up on the approach his father said something, not always mean, sometimes just "Let's go, let's go, let's go," like a coach, and Wally could see it hitting Russ between the shoulder blades like a thrown thing. In the seventh frame Russ left a split. In the eighth he threw a ball in the gutter, the first one Wally had seen him throw since January.
"Jesus," said Ron, to nobody, to everybody. "Jesus Christ. Here we go."
Augie walked down the row and sat down next to Ron and said something to him in a low voice that Wally couldn't hear, and Ron laughed and said, "It's a free country, Augie," and put his feet up on the seat in front of him.
Wally was bowling the best game of his life.
It was something about being too busy thinking about Russ to think about himself. Three steps, low, the blue Ebonite swinging past his ankle, and he wasn't thinking about his father or the shoes or the pins being a wall. Strike in the fifth. Spare in the sixth. Strike in the eighth. Spare in the ninth.
Going into the tenth frame, the green numbers on the monitor said that with handicap, the Zimmerman twins from West Allis, who had finished their third game two lanes over and were standing behind the ball rack with their mother eating Bel-Air Lanes soft pretzels, were ahead by fourteen.
Russ bowled first in the tenth.
His first ball was a good one. He'd taken a breath, a long one, standing at the line, and he'd thrown it soft, and it went into the pocket clean and all of the pins went down except one.
The ten pin. Alone in the back right corner. Wobbling a little, and then standing still.
"Oh, you're kidding me," said Ron Kubiak loudly. Half the people on lanes twenty-seven through thirty-two turned around. "The ten pin? Are you kidding me?"