"I remember. You were lousy."
"I was lousy." Something like a smile. "Mind if I sit?"
He sat at the end of the bench, the end, where the small people sat, and he watched. He watched Russ on the approach of lane two, throwing soft, and he watched Wally in the pit of lane two, clearing the deadwood and getting his feet up, and he didn't say anything for a whole line, which Lorraine said later was a world record and should be reported to the newspaper. When Russ picked up a seven-ten split, which nobody ever picks up, which Wally had only ever seen once from the back, his father sat up straight on the bench.
"Nice ball," Ron Kubiak said. Not loud. He said it to the floor, almost. But Russ heard it, all the way at the foul line, and he stood there with his back to the room for a second before he turned around.
It wasn't everything. Wally knew that, even then. There would be Tuesday nights, and the TV left on over the shoe repair shop, and Russ on the Nowickis' back step some Sundays with his jaw tight, and Busia handing him a plate without asking. It wasn't everything. But it was one pin. And Augie said you made a game one pin at a time, and anybody who told you different was selling something.
* * *
At noon the Knights went home and Ron went with them, because Hank had cornered him at the bottom of the stairs about 1949, and the Cellar was quiet except for the furnace.
Russ climbed up on the perch of lane one. Wally took the blue Ebonite out of the ball return and walked up to the approach in his black Brunswicks with the slide on the right.
He stood at the line. Sixty feet away, in the dark above the pit, Russ's sneakers dangled, the swoosh peeling off one of them. Then the sneakers came up, both of them, high and out of the way, because Russ had learned too, and he'd stopped forgetting.
"Hey, Nowicki," Russ called down the lane, and his voice came booming back off the pressed-tin ceiling, and Wally could hear him grinning. "You can't even hit one pin."
"I know," Wally said.
He took three steps and went down low, and the ball went past his ankle and off his fingers, and he stood there at the line and watched it go, spinning, curving, slow and patient, taking its time like it had all day, like it was going to visit somebody, all the way down to where the pins were waiting with room in between them.
Ten of them went down together, like they'd agreed to it.
"Show-off," said Russ, from the dark, and jumped down to set them up again.