"Busia," he said. "Why can't I do it?"
"Do what?"
"Bowl. Like him. I watched him. I watched him a million times. I know how it goes. I can see it in my head. And then I get up there and it's like—" He didn't have a word. He made a gesture with his sugary hands, like something falling apart.
Busia considered this. She had a way of considering that took a while, her lips moving a little, as if she were translating from one language to another, which maybe she was.
"When you were small," she said, "you ate with the wrong hand. The left. You colored with the left. You threw a ball with the left. Your father, he thought this was very funny, he said we have a lefty, we'll put him in the Braves, but the Braves were gone to Atlanta already. And then you went to the school, and the sister there, Sister Bernadine, she was from the old days, she tied your left hand in your lap with a dish towel so you would write with the right. You remember?"
Wally did not remember. He looked at his hands.
"Your mother went to the school and screamed. I was very proud. But by then you had learned to do everything both ways." Busia shrugged. "I am only saying. Maybe you are trying to walk on the wrong side of the road."
"Augie saw," Wally said slowly. "When I threw the shoe. I threw it left."
"Augie," said Busia, "is not as stupid as he looks."
She got up and went to the stove, where something with cabbage in it was happening, and that was the end of the conversation.
Downstairs, it turned out, was the Cellar.
You got to it through a door behind the tavern's walk-in cooler, down a set of wooden stairs so steep they were practically a ladder, and at the bottom there was a long, low room with a pressed-tin ceiling and two bowling lanes that looked like they had been there since the Kaiser. They had. Augie's father had put them in in 1921, when Pulaski Lanes was just a tavern with a gimmick, and they were still certified by the American Bowling Congress, with a yellowed certificate in a frame on the wall to prove it. The approaches were scarred with seventy years of slide marks. The gutters were wood. There were no pinsetters. Where the machines should have been, at the far end of each lane, there was a dark pit, a heavy padded curtain hanging at the back of it, and above it, on each side, a little wooden ledge just wide enough for someone to sit on.
"Pinboy perch," Augie said, slapping it. "Your office."
"Somebody sets them," Wally said. "By hand."
"Every alley in Milwaukee, till the machines came in the fifties. Half the pinboys were drunks and the other half were twelve." Augie patted the ledge fondly. "But the Saturday Morning Knights like the old lanes. Average age seventy-four. Two of 'em set pins right here before the war. They'll tell you how to do it wrong."