Augie looked at him. He looked at the sock. He looked at the right shoe still on Wally's foot, the black and white Dexter, and something happened to his face. The red drained out of it all at once, the way water goes out of a sink.
He didn't say anything. He turned around and walked down the side of the lanes to the little door by lane sixteen that said EMPLOYEES ONLY - THIS MEANS YOU, and went through it, and they heard him back there behind the masking units, banging around inside the machine, swearing in two languages. The bell stopped. The red light went off. After a while the door opened again and Augie came out carrying the shoe.
It had a scuff across the toe now and a smear of black grease on the white part, and one of the laces had been chewed off short by something in the machine. Augie held it in both hands, carefully, the way Wally had held the grocery sack.
"Office," Augie said to Wally. Then he looked at Russ, who was standing at the ball return trying very hard to look like someone who had just arrived. "You too, Kubiak."
"Me? What'd I do? He threw it!"
"I been running this house since Truman," said Augie. "I know what you did. Office."
* * *
The office was a closet behind the shoe counter with a desk, two folding chairs, a calendar from Kurtis Kraft Plumbing Supply turned to the wrong month, and a wall of photographs. Most of them were men in bowling shirts holding trophies and squinting. Some of them were very old, brown and curling, men with handlebar mustaches and vests standing in front of lanes that looked exactly like the lanes outside. Over the desk there was a framed newspaper page from the Milwaukee Sentinel with a picture of a man in mid-delivery, his left foot sliding out, his right leg swept behind him like a dancer's, his face completely calm.
Wally knew that picture. There was a copy of it in a drawer at home, folded in quarters, the creases gone soft.
LOCAL MAN ROLLS 299 ON "BOWLING PARTY," the headline said. NOWICKI MISSES PERFECTION BY ONE PIN.
Augie set the shoe on the desk. He sat down heavily in his chair, which complained about it, and looked at Wally for a long time.
"You're Eddie's boy," he said finally.
Wally nodded.
"I seen you here. Little. You used to sit on the end of the bench on Tuesdays and eat chips and get crumbs in my ball return." He rubbed his face. "I didn't recognize you. You got tall. I was at the funeral, you know. I don't know if you remember. I was the fat one who cried."
"I remember," Wally said. He did. He remembered that almost everyone at St. Josaphat's that day had been a man in a bowling shirt, because that was what his father's friends owned that was nice, and that the shirts had been every color, orange and teal and maroon and yellow, so that the church looked like a box of crayons, and that his mother had laughed about it afterward, the first time she had laughed in a week, and then cried harder.