Wally got up on one knee. He held the shoe by the heel, low, down by the floor, the way you'd hold a ball, and he swung his arm back once, and brought it forward, and let it go.
He threw it left-handed. He didn't think about that, either.
The shoe hit the lane flat on its leather sole about a foot past the foul line and it did not bounce, and it did not tumble. It slid. The lanes at Pulaski had just been dressed that morning, and the oil lay on the wood like a sheet of glass, and Eddie Nowicki's left shoe went skating down lane nine like a little black-and-white boat on a pond, spinning slowly, a lazy quarter turn and then another, the laces trailing behind it. It went straight down the middle of the lane, past the arrows, past the place where the oil ran out. And when it hit the dry part at the back end, the leather sole grabbed, and the spin caught, and the shoe hooked.
It hooked to the right, a slow, graceful, ridiculous curve, and drifted toward the corner of the triangle, where the ten pin stood all by itself.
It touched the ten pin on the heel.
The ten pin wobbled. It wobbled for what felt like a full minute. It leaned out over the gutter, and then back, and then out again, and then it lay down with a soft wooden tock and rolled into the pit.
The whole of lane nine was silent. Lane eight was silent. Lane ten had a girl standing on the bench with her hand over her mouth.
The A-2 pinsetter did not know what to do with a shoe. It lowered its deck, grabbed the nine standing pins, swept the shoe back into the pit with the dead wood, and set the pins down again, and somewhere back there in its belly something went clunk and then grrrrrnk and then a red light came on above the lane and a bell started ringing.
"One," said Debbie Lisowski, very quietly. "He hit one."
Across the room, a door banged open.
Augie Brzezinski was sixty-seven years old and built like a mailbox, short and square and blue, because he wore the same navy work shirt every day with AUGIE stitched over the pocket in red script. He had a white crew cut you could have scrubbed pots with and forearms like hams, and he came across the concourse with a pinsetter wrench in one hand and a face the color of a stop sign.
"Who," he said. He didn't shout it. He didn't have to. "Who put a shoe in my machine."
Thirty-one seventh graders discovered something fascinating about their own fingernails.
Wally was still on one knee at the foul line, wearing one shoe and one striped tube sock with a wad of toilet paper sticking out the end of it like a cartoon bandage. There was not a lot of point in denying it.
"Me," he said.