"I saw."
"He never nods," Russ said, wonderingly, and then the Knights got him again.
There is a shelf behind the shoe counter at Pulaski Lanes, high up, above the cubbies where the rental shoes go and below the framed page from the Milwaukee Sentinel. Augie put it up himself in April with two brackets from Kurtis Kraft Plumbing Supply and a board he planed down in the Cellar, and he swore at it in two languages for most of an afternoon until it was level.
On it, on a square of green felt that Busia cut from an old card-table cover, there is a pair of black-and-white Dexters, size ten and a half, with a scuff on the left toe and a little gray shadow of grease on the white leather that would not come out, and one lace that is newer than the other. Next to them there is a small brass plaque from the trophy shop on Oklahoma Avenue. Wally had worked out what it should say himself, on the back of a social studies worksheet, crossing things out for a week. It says:
EDWARD NOWICKI
1943 - 1982
299
That's all. Augie said that was enough. Augie said anybody who needed more than that should ask him, and they'd get an hour.
Below it, on the corkboard, between the car keys and the Pontiac, which still hadn't sold, there is a Polaroid that Debbie Lisowski took in the parking lot of Bel-Air Lanes in the rain. Two boys holding a trophy shaped like a small gold bowler, one tall, one not, both of them squinting, and behind them, slightly out of focus, seven old men in purple and a very small old woman in a church coat, and a square man in a tie who has turned his head away just as the picture was taken, so you can't see his face.
* * *
Ron Kubiak came to the Cellar on a Saturday in May.
He came down the steep stairs at a quarter to ten, slowly, in a Schmitt's Auto Body jacket, and stood at the bottom with his hands in his pockets the way his son did, and the Knights all stopped talking at once. Augie looked at him from the scorer's table. Ron didn't have a beer. He didn't have anything.
"Ronnie," Augie said.
"Augie." Ron looked at the lanes, at the old wood, at the perches. "Jeez. I set pins down here. You remember? Summer of '61. My old man made me."