I closed the cigar box and set it on the counter of the Starlite between Marge Kaminski and me. Inside, wrapped in a handkerchief of my father, was the score sheet from lane nine for Wednesday, March 12, 1975. In the margin, in the tiny square handwriting of Stanley Wojcik, were two license plate numbers and the words, “Black Buick, two men, 11:40 PM, they took Eddie.” My father had written it the night it happened. Then he had hidden it for fifty years because the third man in that parking lot had come back a week later and told him what would happen to me.
Marge did not cry. She had cried all she was going to cry in 1975, she told me, and what was left was something harder and more patient. She smoothed the score sheet flat with her hand, the way you would smooth a tablecloth, and said, “I always knew Stanley was keeping something. I just did not want to make him choose between me and his son.” She looked at me over her glasses. “Joey, you are not your father. You are allowed to choose differently.”
The man in question was my own godfather, Vincent Rusek. He had held me at the font of Saint Casimir in 1966. He had come to every birthday of mine and slipped me a twenty dollar bill in a handshake. He was eighty seven now, a tiny man in a cardigan at a care home in Dundalk, and he still sent a card at Christmas with a crisp bill in it. I stared at that name written in the margin of my father, and I felt the whole of my childhood tilt slightly to one side, like a bowling lane after rain.
The truth does not spoil in the dark. It waits, patient as a pin at the end of the lane, for someone brave enough to roll.
I called an agent named Denise Okafor, who ran the cold case desk at the federal building downtown, and she came to the lanes herself on a Wednesday afternoon, which is the day Marge always played. She read the score sheet twice with her glasses pushed up on her forehead. “Mister Wojcik, plates in 1975 are traceable if the old registration files survived,” she said. “And they did. I need your permission to look, and I need Missus Kaminski to know it may lead nowhere.” Marge said, “It has led nowhere for fifty years. Look.”
It took the agent three weeks. The first plate belonged to a man who had died in 1991, a union enforcer named Clarence Duda. The second belonged to a car that had been registered, for three years, to a trucking company with a very small office on Eastern Avenue. The owner of that company was Vincent Rusek.
By the end of the month there were two more people in the room, a prosecutor and a gray haired detective, and they asked me whether I would be willing to sit with my godfather and talk. I said I would. My hands did not stop shaking until I got to the parking lot.
He was sitting by the window in a yellow chair. He looked at me and smiled with his whole face the way he always had. I put the cigar box on his tray table and opened it. He did not speak for a long time. Then he said in a voice like old paper, “Your father was a brave man, Joey. I told him to keep quiet because I was afraid for you. That was true. It was also true that I was afraid for myself.” He folded his hands. “Eddie is in a quarry in Harford County, under the old crusher. I have been waiting for someone to ask.”
They found the remains of Eddie Kaminski in the third week of October, exactly where my godfather had said. The detective called me before he called anyone else, and I drove to the home of Marge with my hat in my hands. She opened the door before I knocked. She had already seen the cars on the road. She said, “Is it him?” and I said, “It is him,” and she took my hand and held it with a grip so strong it hurt. We stood on her porch for a long time, two old fools in the cold, and neither of us said anything.
The funeral was held at Holy Rosary on a bright Saturday. Four hundred people came, steelworkers and their widows and their grandchildren, men who had known Eddie from the mill and men who only knew the story. The union sent a wreath with a card that said, in plain block letters, that they were sorry it had taken so long. Marge sat in the front pew in a navy coat and looked straight ahead, and when the priest said the name of her husband she said it softly along with him, the way you say a name you have never stopped saying.
In December we put a small brass plate on the wall above lane nine. It says, in the clean letters of the engraver, that this lane has been kept for Eddie and Marge Kaminski since 1975. Marge still bowls there every Wednesday, in the same pair of rented shoes she refuses to buy. My father would have laughed at that. Last week she rolled a strike on her very first ball, turned around with her arms up, and said to the empty chair beside her, “Did you see that, Eddie?” And I swear to you the pins stood still a moment before they fell.