“Why,” I mumbled, not really asking. I felt dizzy with his dismissal; I reached carefully behind me for the counter so I wouldn’t knock too hard against it if my knees gave.
“The place was haunted. That’s why.” Leo gave me a look. “You believe in ghosts?”
“Sure,” I said. If an adult asked whether you believed in something, you believed. It was good policy.
“No you don’t,” he said. I shrugged.
“When I started down there as a pin boy, it was like as if you fell into a movie. You’d have all kinds of stars come through there after a show upstairs—Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe, even. And the bowlers,” he shook his head and looked at the floor as if words had escaped him. “The Budweiser team came there once, back when they had Weber, Carter, Bluth, all of them. Bluth shot 834 once, unheard of in those days. But that’s not my point. My point is that a kid I worked with down there had a seizure one night and choked on his tongue, and after that you could hear a ball rolling down the lane after everybody cleared out. You were the last one out, you got to hear him rolling a few lines after work.”
Leo squinted at me as if he wasn’t sure I deserved to hear the rest.
“Okay,” I prompted.
“Okay, here’s the thing. I was a cheat. Not for myself, but I’d bunch the pins for guys I liked so they’d get more strikes, and they tipped me in. I didn’t believe in all that. So I never heard the ghost ball.”
He stopped and looked at me again, as if trying to decide whether I’d gotten his almighty point. “Look out there,” he said. I looked over my shoulder; through the door I could see the usual run for a Saturday: parents with their kids doing grandma rolls, retired leaguers getting their practice rolls in, guys from school cranking the ball as hard as they could down the lane, their girlfriends rolling limp-wristed, the best way to get tendon strain. And my father, already at Lane 3, leaning slowly forward on the bench and putting on his shoes. I looked back at Leo, biting my lip to steady myself—all those little tricks my father had taught me: a quick bite on the inside of the cheek can distract you from your fear and help you get back your focus; blow on your wrists if you start to feel dizzy, deep breaths. All those tricks, and none of them had worked for him after all.
“If you believe you’re like them, you’re like them, just having fun,” Leo continued. “You can’t just be good. You have to want to win.”
“I win a lot!” I said. My voice quivered, which infuriated me. I thought about what my father had said, about how you could be talented, but without a plan you’d get nowhere. But we had a plan, and it was a good plan. The whole situation had gotten confused. “I’ve been Junior Bowler of the Year for three years!”
Leo waved at the air. “Your father thinks you’re God’s gift. So what are you going to do? You want to go pro, fine. Your dad may have bad nerves, but he can help. But if you really want to win, you come see me again. I’ll get you ready. Just no talking about it. I don’t want everyone bugging me.”
I swallowed. I knew he was saying my father wasn’t good enough to make me a pro. I knew he would think that even if he’d been aware that my father was sick. I hated him for saying it. But I hated even more that I believed him. “Drill the ball, Leo,” I said, bearing down on my voice so it wouldn’t shake.
“Here,” he said, handing me the finger-sizer. “You’ve got some skinny digits, lady, but let’s see if you’ve changed any.” He winked at me, and then he was back to the behind-the-counter Leo, the good-time guy. But there was still that layer beneath, like the weight in a ball. Or like the deeper you go in water, the colder it gets. I was pretty sure that if I’d brought up the ghosts again, he’d ask me what the hell I was talking about.
Turned out, my fingers had gotten a half-size thicker since he’d drilled the White Dot for me. Leo said it was good we were sizing in the afternoon, when your hands swelled; that way he wouldn’t drill too tight and risk making the ball hang. You could dislocate a finger that way, he told me, filing each slug to soften the edge. “The professional treatment, that’s what you’re getting,” Leo said, blowing away the dust. It hung in the air for a moment, a glittery cloud. I couldn’t wait to roll that ball, and at the same time, my throat ached. It was maybe the first time I remember being heartbroken. It was the first time I understood the word.
Leo ended up drilling my ball the way my father suggested. He just didn’t want to take orders from a guy he used to coach, was what I thought. I hated him for that, too. And yet what he’d said about winning seemed to be about more than just being good. Or even perfect.
He finished drilling the fingertip holes and said he’d slug it deeper if I didn’t like it. He put it in my hands, and I slid my first knuckles in, the holes still friction-warm. “You’re going to have to give it some time,” he said then, watching me try it. “It’s gonna be like as if you’re starting over.”
“I know, I know,” I said. I thought he meant about going pro. I was thinking about the next tournament, and how it would be to sail that ball. I was thinking about my father, and how I wanted to do everything we planned. Everything. I wanted to stand at the head of that lane at the Showboat, go all the way. Settle an old score. If Leo could help me do that, I’d take him up on it. But the credit would go to my father, every bit. “I’ll put my time in,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You’re gonna have to get used to it is what I mean. Try it out and I’ll adjust it, and then we’ll put in the grips.”
So, for a short time, I had two coaches—an official one and a secret one—Leo behind me and my father on the other side of the glass, who I could see at the top of our lane then, pulling his arm straight across his chest to stretch the muscles. Everybody had been waiting for me to beat him, my father included. I hadn’t yet, though plenty of times I’d rolled well enough to do it. “The key is,” my father would say after each game, “You have to try for the perfect strike whether you’re competing or not.”
But I knew Leo saw it differently. He’d say you only have to win when you’re in the game.
In fact, the first time I met him for a practice, which I scheduled right after school when my father would still be at work, Leo put it like this: “The world cares about the what, not the how. The sooner you understand what I mean here, the better off you’ll be.” Turns out he knew that better than anyone.
SO FOR SIX days in 1961, my older brother Walt was dead. And truth be told, everything comes down to that. I’m telling this, so I get to call it.
Now this was before I met Joe Wycheski—hell, he was still popping zits between rolls back then. One day we heard Walt had gotten blown up by a rocket-propelled grenade near a Michelin rubber plantation somewhere in Vietnam, next thing he’s coming home alive. It was like as if we had a regular Lazarus in the family.
Our father worked at Engineered Fittings out on Milan Road, just like Joe Wycheski did later on, dropping nut blanks on the screw machines, moving up from the facers and the hand tappers. Our mother kept the house and kept Walt and me straight as she was able. We were seven years apart, one lost in the middle. The idea was Walt would take our father’s spot—that’s what people did, pass their job down. And I’d have to bid or figure out something else.
Not too many choices either. The quarry, fishing boats, factories. None of it was for me. I’d grown up at the lanes in the cellar down below the State Theatre on Columbus and Water, first crouched behind my father when he rolled in matches, then as a pin boy, then going head-to-head myself with some of the best of the day. Bowling was the only thing I ever cared about.
When I wasn’t setting pins,