Russ sat in the other folding chair with his arms crossed and his jacket zipped up to his chin and looked at the wall.
"Here's what's gonna happen," Augie said. "Your shoe dinged my lane. Not bad. A little sanding. It jammed my machine. Also not bad. I fixed worse with a coat hanger. But there's thirty kids out there who just saw a guy throw a shoe down my lane and get a pin for it, and if I don't do something about it, by Saturday I'm gonna have shoes, boots, galoshes, I'm gonna have somebody's grandma's orthopedics in the back of my pinsetters. So you're gonna work it off."
"Work it off," Wally repeated.
"Saturday mornings. Eight a.m. till noon. Downstairs."
"What's downstairs?" said Russ, and then looked like he wished he hadn't said anything, because Augie turned to him.
"You're coming too, Kubiak. Same deal."
"For what? I didn't throw nothing!"
"You said something to make him throw it." Augie leaned forward. The chair complained again. "I know your old man. Ronnie Kubiak bowls Tuesday nights on lane four for Schmitt's Auto Body, and he throws a ball like he's mad at it, and every week I hear his mouth from the shoe counter. I know what you said, son. I could hear the shape of it from across the room. I heard it before. I heard it twenty years ago from a different Kubiak."
Russ's face went white and then red, and he looked at the floor, and he did not say anything else.
"Eight a.m.," said Augie. "Wear old clothes. And bring sneakers that fit you." He looked at Wally's socks. "Both of you."
He pushed the shoe across the desk to Wally. Wally picked it up. The grease smear wouldn't come off. He rubbed it with his thumb anyway.
"He'd have laughed, you know," Augie said, quieter. "Your dad. If he'd seen that. He'd have laughed so hard he'd have had to sit down." He paused. "And then he'd have whupped you."
* * *
His mother picked him up at three-thirty in the Chevy Citation with the brown door that didn't match the other doors. She had already heard. Mr. Pfaff had called the bakery where she did the books, which meant that Mrs. Wozniak at the bakery had also heard, which meant that the whole south side would have heard by suppertime.
She didn't say anything until they were all the way down Lincoln Avenue and over the bridge onto Kinnickinnic, past the Avalon Theater, where Ghostbusters was still playing even though it had come out in June.