Bad hair day

This was the first time Rock had seen Ashley in nearly three years, and she looked awful. She was nearly bald. Her exposed scalp was covered in soars and scabs. Rock had no idea why she was at his front door and, in fact, would never learn why she had come.
Ashley told him she hadn't had a drink since 2004. Rock knew better. He had drunk with her several times in 2005, and for the last time in 2013, when she was in North Little Rock for her father's funeral.
After they had conversed for a few minutes, Ashley's hair seemed normal. Rock forgot whatever his first impression of it had been.

An examination

These weren't Rock's usual doctor. The first, a man, checked his blood pressure. Rock's systolic reading was in the mid-one twenties, but his diastolic was fifty-eight.
"Bill Joseph is my doctor, and he put me on this really strong blood-pressure medicine," Rock said. "Do you think he might want to put me on something not quite as strong?"
"That's a possibility," the doctor said.
The next doctor, a woman, pulled out a plastic instrument of some sort that was about the shape and size of a ball-point pin. She made it clear that she intended to insert it in Rock's right arm. Rock resisted, but she would not be denied and almost angrily stuck it in just above his elbow. To Rock's surprise, there was no pain involved. Also to his surprise, the doctor withdrew from his arm a clear liquid that looked as if it had ground black pepper floating in it.
"It's obvious that you've eaten some pepper today," the doctor said. "You have, haven't you?"

The Dow Jones

Everyone at the newspaper was sweating out the markets, which struck Rock as odd. He couldn't remember anyone so much as paying attention to them before.
When the Dow Jones closed, Rock looked to see that it was up four points for the day, far from significant, but everyone he could see looked depressed.
"What's the deal?" Rock asked a woman near him named Allison. "The Dow closed ahead. Why is everybody so down?"
"Only two components were up for the day," Allison said.

Home runs

Several people had purchased seats in Rock's back bedroom so they would have a chance to catch home runs hit by professional baseball players. Rock was confused, since the baseball stadium was in front of his house. Obviously, if there were any chance of a ball flying through a window into his house, it would have to come in from the front. Also, it was 7 a.m. and late December. Clearly there were no baseball games underway anywhere nearby.

An almanac

Rock and his workmates were seated around the copy desk in the Miami Herald sports department when their boss asked them an odd question.
"OK, if you guys could go over to the news desk and steal anything you wanted for our department, what would it be?"
Rock answered without hesitation. "The first thing I'd go for would be a copy of the World Almanac," he said. "Every department at every newspaper needs one."
Apparently no one knew how to respond. Even Rock understood that the Internet had turned almanacs virtually obsolete

Hair

An Arab man washed his hair as he walked through this very airport the day before, but another Arab man, presumed a terrorist, poured sulfuric acid on his head from a small glass jar.
Many people mentioned this to Rock as he also walked through the airport while washing his hair, but as far as he was concerned, he had no choice. Rock's hair was filthy and he was about to fly somewhere for a funeral.

The Bear

Because of heavy rain, golfers would have to finish the first round of the Arkansas Open on a temporary plastic green set up in the Burns Park Golf Course clubhouse.
Rock agreed to cover the event for the paper, and as he watched the first few golfers finish, noticed a box full of old, yellowed scorecards near his table. With a glance, Rock could see they had been filled out, obviously years earlier. He picked one up and was delighted to see it was signed by Cary Middlecoff, a golfer of worldwide significance in the 1960s. He looked more closely and saw one signed by Hubert Green, another by Mike Souchak, and then, almost unbelievably, Rock held in his hand a frayed, stained scorecard signed perhaps fifty years earlier by Jack Nicklaus.
It disappointed Rock that none of the golfers in the clubhouse seemed interested by it.

Tech wizards

Jeff Bezos was among the tech wizards gathered in Rock's front bed room on a gloomy, mid-December Saturday morning. There were several others there Rock couldn't identify, but he knew they all had come to seek his technological advice, which he would gladly offer once he drank some coffee and wiped the sleep from his eyes.
Before the men arrived, Rock lay in his cool bed with his cat Jo curled near his ankles. He wondered how he had managed to gather such bounty.

Skydiving

They were literally floating through the clouds. It was raining heavily in downtown Little Rock, and Rock and another sportswriter from the paper were at about three-thousand feet, descending gradually toward the Democrat Building.
For the time being they felt safe, but Rock's cohort had watched the weather report and was worried the clouds would run out. Rock was more confident. "I think we'll be OK," he said. "This feels to me like the sort of rainstorm that will stick around all day."
"I don't know, Rock. I wouldn't count on it."
Suddenly Rock was in doubt. "Shit, man, maybe we shouldn't, but what choice do we have?"
Almost the moment he said it, Rock could see the clouds start to break up to the south. Seconds later they were in blue skies and a free fall.
The other man was about fifty feet below Rock and maybe the same distance further east. He held two parachutes. Rock stretched out horizontally in an attempt to slow himself and perhaps maneuver more closely to his partner, but they were running out of time.
"I'm going to try to throw one of these too you," the other shouted.
"Fine," Rock said. "Give it your best shot."
The man threw the chute, and it came quickly at Rock, who reached in the split second he had to catch it; he missed and knew in that instant he was doomed. Rock considered shouting to the other man the names of people to tell that he loved but was already out of range. As the buildings closed in, he knew he had only seconds to live, but Rock was nevertheless pleased to feel a certain peace. He wished everyone could know that he did not die terrified or panicked.

Work

It was the first time Rock had been in the Arkansas Democrat building since late spring, 2009, and he couldn't believe how much it had changed.
The stairwell looked as modern as one in a new building, though the Democrat Building was nearly a hundred years old. Immediately after Rock walked through the doorway to the newsroom, he was stunned to see that it looked completely different from before.
He had never seen so many people on the floor. It was apparent to Rock there was a holiday party underway as he walked through it toward the sports department. About halfway there, he saw two reporters scuffling. He at first thought they were pretending but soon realized they were engaged in a genuine fight. One had his arm around the other's head, which he continually slugged. Blood was everywhere.
Despite their clash, no one paid them any attention. It looked as though the one being slugged was close to dead and no one seemed to care. Rock walked past without a second thought.

A new look

Both of Rock's eyes were black, but Dr. Bill Josephson told him not to worry, that they had become nearly fashionable. "No, I'm not kidding," he said. "Chicks like black eyes. They make you look tough."
Rock was on his back on the cold tile of his tiny bathroom and was having trouble getting up. He knocked over two metal vases filled with blue and yellow plastic flowers, pea gravel and wood chips, and knew immediately the cleanup would be a pain in the ass. Josephson gave him a hand. "Here, man, take a look at yourself," he said. "Put on your glasses. They'll add to it."
Rock looked in the mirror and saw what his doctor was talking about. This look was pretty cool, like that of a fighter pilot or lifeguard.

The chair

Several writers from the paper, including Rock, were at the Pine Bluff Convention Center to cover a basketball tournament. Their work station was among a long row of tables in a hallway that ran through the conjoining hotel. There was commotion all around as Rock and the other reporters attempted to write. Hotel employees and guests were constantly walking past, apparently oblivious to them.
Rock's dissatisfaction increased when he noticed that the seat of his chair was beginning to disintegrate. Within a minute, the entire chair was in shambles. It looked as if someone had smashed it to bits with sledge hammer or thrown it into heavy traffic. Rock feared the hotel would charge him for it.

Forever

It seemed intolerable but would clearly endure forever, and there was consequently no hope for Rock unless he could learn to live for eternity in this other world. He was there with nothing except an odd, wet house and his cat Jo, who Rock suspected was as confused as he.
This was so very strange, and they would have to wait until the end of time to get back to the home they were familiar with.

Too slow

Someone rigged a five-kilometer road race in Levy so that Rock and his friend David Maloney were forced to maintain a pace between zero and two miles an hour, with an increase of a quarter of a mile an hour each fifteen minutes.

Both were dressed in Santa Claus costumes. Neither knew why they were required to proceed so slowly.

A tournament and a race

It was the Fourth of July weekend in Little Rock, and Rock was in War Memorial Park to cover the Firecracker Fast 5K and the 4th of July Classic (a men's golf tournament featuring Arkansas's best amateurs). They were by far the most significant sporting events in Arkansas that weekend and right up Rock's journalistic alley, but there were oddities about both that he was unsure how to handle.
In the 5K, a very overweight friend of Rock's named Chuck Drury ran anchor on the winning four-man relay team. This was a result that demanded investigation. Rock had known Chuck for years and knew there was no way his slowness could be overcome by three other runners, regardless of how fast they were.
As for the golf tournament, four men had won a team competition of some sort, but Rock knew one of the men and had seen him and his teammates drinking heavily in the clubhouse. He was fairly certain they had never been on the course.

Bees

Rock had just built a beehive in his backyard but had yet to see a bee. He walked with a teenage boy in a long basement hallway beneath a complex of government buildings and complained. "That thing isn't worth a shit if there aren't any bees around," he said.
Suddenly bees appeared everywhere. There were honeycombs on the floor with bees buzzing all about. They began to sting Rock, who wasn't sure what to do. After a moment he began to run. He took a hard right turn and immediately came upon an enormous, muscle-bound man who took a full swing with a heavy wooden broom handle and hit Rock in the head.
Rock felt and heard the harsh crack and was stunned. He wondered whether this man was about to beat him to death.

Women's basketball

Each of the players on the women's basketball team were dressed in all-white uniforms and performed a sequence of drills with such precision that Rock and his associates knew they were watching a highly-trained exhibition squad. Rock was with a group from the paper, including their boss Wallace Hill, in a beautifully maintained gymnasium built at least seventy years earlier.
Watching the women inspired Rock to pick up a loose ball and dribble toward the unoccupied goal at the other end of the court.
"Rock, don't do that while the girls are still playing," Hill said.
Rock ignored him and took several shots, none of which came close. His technique was so bad that the ball failed to reach height of the rim.

Race day

A big race was clearly at hand. Rock was at Oaklawn Park to cover it, and before he went to the pressbox, he wandered around the track and the infield to see the crowd and interpret its level of enthusiasm.
Rock and all around were amused to see a man pretend he was a race horse. He ran counterclockwise in a large circle across the infield grass and announced his progress as if he were a track announcer: "And Bill wins the Arkansas Derby!"
He was soon joined by another man, also in his mid-20s and also dressed in a short-sleeved white oxford-cloth shirt. They raced one another like children, and everyone there laughed hard at the ridiculousness of their effort.

Going fast

It had been five years since Rock last ran in a road race, but he entered a 5K at the last minute in a small town's city square. He completed the paper work late and started at least a hundred yards behind the field.
Rock recognized with his first steps that he was very fit and seemingly as fast as he had been at his peak, thirty-five years earlier. He passed most of the slower runners in the first minute or two and held hope that he might catch the leaders.
The only matter to somewhat stymy his effort was the slickness of the wet brick streets. He had trouble with traction on any but straight and level sections of the course but otherwise felt great, indeed indefatigable.

Underdressed

As he usually did, Rock showed up at Oaklawn Park for an afternoon of horse racing and looked to make sure his friends Ray and Carrol were there. They both had four reserved seats for each day of the meet and always welcomed Rock with good cheer.
Rock walked up a ramp to the grandstand and heard Ray say, "Rock. Good to see you. Come grab one of these seats."
Rock was delighted, but then he suddenly realized he had forgotten to put on his clothes. He was dressed only in white briefs, and embarrassment washed across him. But luckily he happened to have a pair of blue jeans and a shirt draped across his right arm and quickly dressed.

Jealousy

He hadn't yet admitted it, but Rock suspected that most of his cohorts in the newspaper's sports department knew he had a crush on an intern named Amanda Lewis. He had first seen her in the pressbox at a college football game, where she worked as a part-time student aid for the school's sports information department as an eighteen-year-old freshman.
From the start, Rock thought Amanda was lovely. She was tall and lean with shoulder-length brunette hair and the face of a fair child, unadorned by makeup.
Amanda had just turned twenty-one and traveled with Rock and Todd Troutt to cover a college basketball tournament out of state. Rock and Todd each had rooms in their hotel, and much to Rock's disappointment, Amanda chose to room with Todd.
Later that first night, Rock decided to drive somewhere for dinner. He walked into the parking lot to find his twenty-year-old Toyota Camry balanced vertically on its grill, pointed into the asphalt. He immediately wondered how to get it down and how anyone could have put it in such a bizarre position.

A place to run

The track at Oaklawn Park was damp and tightly packed, and a jockey named Greta told Rock it was a perfect surface for runs early in the morning before trainers brought their horses out to train. She and Rock stood near the edge of the track at the end of the runway from the paddock.
Rock decided to give it a try. He jogged out and back for twenty seconds or so from where they stood.

"You're right," he said. "This reminds of Daytona Beach."

MASH

The characters from the television show MASH were in Rock's house and on his front lawn. Apparently someone was filming a reunion show. All the actors were there, including Alan Alda and Jamie Farr.
Rock was baffled. It seemed as if they were attempting to wrap up the show but were confused and couldn't decide what route to take. They all seemed hungry as they dug through bowls of candy in Rock's den, particularly Harry Morgan.

Ben Hogan

His glasses from the past, which he found under his back bedroom bed, were a product of the Ben Hogan company. Rock found them while hypoglycemic, but put them down and did not find them until hours later when fully awake and after he'd eaten half a Mounds bar.
By then he had found the newer, non-Ben Hogan glasses which were otherwise identical. He figured something was up, and figured it out when he realized he had picked up a pair of Ben Hogan golf shorts and apparently mistaken them for glasses.

The Pepsi 10K

It was the first time Rock had run a road race downtown since the 2010 Little Rock 5K, and he was surprised how good he felt as he ran the revival of the old Pepsi 10K, particularly considering his lack of training. He was well into the race and had managed to keep up with Zach, a relatively fast friend from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers.
With about two miles to go, they passed the house of a pretty Hasher named Stephanie. She told them she had refreshments and snacks inside. Years earlier Rock had a crush on her, though she was clearly disinterested. Rock had let it go with little more than a thought and now she refused to so much as acknowledge his presence. Consequently, Rock merely walked into her house, grabbed an energy bar and continued his race.
He felt very good and soon ran away from Zach.

A picnic in Searcy

They treated him as if he belonged. Rock was with a large group of Harding University students near a large, dilapidated barn. Most were dressed in clothes appropriate for exercise and were taking turns shooting an old, almost slick leather basketball at a goal hung near the roof of a storage building beside the barn.
Most of the crowd were eating foil-wrapped snacks of corn and beans, but there was something about Rock's ear of corn that seemed to appeal to everyone, many of whom stopped when Rock was close to reach in and pinch off a few kernels.

Television news

There was some sort of calamity in downtown Galveston, Texas, and news crews from the network affiliates in Houston piled into town. But something went wrong with their equipment, and their newscasts became nothing more than thirty-second loops they used for promotion as the catastrophe in Galveston continued.
Rock watched from Galveston with several Little Rock Hash House Harriers. It seemed unbelievable to them that there was no television news coverage. When Rock awoke in his back bedroom nearly paralyzed by hypoglycemia, he literally yelled for help, but it was soon obvious to him that he was alone. "Where are all those fucking news anchors when you need them?" he grumbled aloud. Two tubes of energy gel later, Rock knew there were no news crews responsible for his dilemma.

The Fortieth

Lots of beer and liquor had gone down the hatch the night before, and Rock and most of his classmates could feel it. He was with them in a vast olive-drab tent set up just as it would've been to host troops near battle grounds anywhere on earth.
It was the fortieth reunion on of the Russellville High School class of 1977. Rock woke up perhaps five minutes after the bulk of his class. He wondered from his bunk past friends from his past, classmates he had seen in some cases frequently over the years. That's where he began an impromptu tour that took him past aging and sometimes familiar faces, most of which he had no chance to attach names to.

Rock's sandwiches

Somehow the goodness of Rock's grilled-swiss-on-rye sandwiches were tied in with the high-flying offenses of the New Orleans Saints and the New York Giants. The announcers talked about it. One suggested a jar of sauerkraut would really help Rock's cause.
The play-by-play man said he thought Rock should consider opening sandwich shops in New Orleans and New York, and of course Rock immediately began to consider just that.

Ricky

Out of the blue, Rock began to wonder about Ricky Harley, a former employee of the paper's sports department. Ricky first worked for the paper as an eager, teenage intern, and later as a full-timer through most of his twenties. He eventually quit the paper under pressure from upper management and then drifted away and lost all contact with anyone there.
Fifteen years later, Rock suddenly became worried about him, and asked his bosses John Krupshaw and Wallace Hill if they could help.
Hill met with Rock in a cluttered alley downtown at dusk. "Here's the problem, Rock," he said. "This opens up all sorts of questions. It could affect the retirements of Yogi Berra and his extended family, and Randy Rainmaker."
Rainmaker was a longtime host of a Little Rock sports radio program, and Rock understood how he and the Berra family were connected to Harley.

Eyes

For the time being, there were only a handful of patrons in the bar, which was alone on a beach, miles from any other structure.
Rock sat at a long, weathered wooden table with two strangers, both of whom said a very popular local musician was on the way and would draw a large crowd, and, sure enough, a crowd soon began to build.
Among it was a young man and wife Rock had known for years. They arrived with a middle-aged man who looked as if he had spent much of his life on the ocean. His ruddy face was chiseled by years of sun and wind, and he wore old cutoff jeans faded nearly to white and a tattered yellow T-shirt.
After it became apparent to the man that the couple he arrived with were friendly acquaintances of Rock's, he apparently felt comfortable opening up. "My wife just said she thought you had evil eyes," he told Rock.
Everyone laughed. "There's nothing evil about this man," the young husband said.
"That could help me," Rock said. "Maybe it will lower people's expectations."

Out of order

Everything in Rock's house was distorted to the point it was nearly unrecognizable. The door frames didn't look right, and the television, tuned to The Beverly Hillbillies, was pointed toward the ceiling. Rock was confused, and his living room looked as if it were in shambles.
Grape juice saved the day.

Sacrifice

Several people in Rock's house were given the opportunity to stop what they considered ultimate evil, though it required a life-or-death gamble with odds weighted heavily against them.
Their choices were to surrender or else fight through severe hypoglycemia and wait for evil to decide whether it would draw them into its trap. Rock watched at least three of his associates sacrifice themselves, and when it was his turn, his also decided to let himself drift through eternity in the void.
But at the last minute, Rock rose from his bed and walked to the kitchen, where he drank several ounces of grape juice and at last chose to stay put.

A walk

Steve Gobe was a hundred yards ahead of Rock as they walked along opposite sides of a busy, four-lane street through Little Rock suburbs toward the paper, but Rock was confident he would catch up.
The street would eventually feed into downtown. Its straight, southerly course would take Gobe and Rock a few blocks east of the paper. They were at least a mile away.
It did not seem curious to Rock that he was walking past a golf course that looked exactly like one he had played in San Antonio eight years earlier, or that on the other side of the street were nothing but weed strewn debris, dominated by rusted, abandoned cars and rotted lumber. He was more concerned with catching Gobe.
Rock reengaged in his pursuit, but after a delay to dodge traffic and cross the street, Gobe was out of sight.
When at last Rock reached the paper's newsroom, he learned that Gobe had arrived several minutes earlier and then left.

Track coverage

Nothing had ever seemed quite as ambiguous to Rock as what the paper wanted from him regarding his track and field coverage.
Was he to go to the meets or just request reports over the telephone? His boss, John Krupshaw, wouldn't tell him how much to write or when to turn it in ("Rock, just give us whatever you got, whenever you get it"). Furthermore, and most confounding, John couldn't decide whether he wanted Rock to report on the sexual orientation of the meets' female triple-jumpers.
"Just find out, best you can, whether or not they're lesbian," John said. "We'll decide later what do with it."
Rock was incredulous. "So what are you telling me, John? I'm supposed to ask those girls whether they're straight or lesbian? For christ's sake, man, how do you suggest I go about that?"
"Just play it by ear. If there's an easy way around it, then great. Otherwise, just let it lie."

On the veranda

The golf course reminded Rock of one he had played in several dreams over the past few years, except that someone had added a knee-deep creek, which he soon learned could not be bypassed.
After his round, and after he had wrung out his shirt and golf shorts, Rock walked onto the rock-lined veranda that overlooked the eighteenth green. It was crowded, every bench seat taken along the rim of the balcony, and a standing throng gathered around those lucky enough to have found chairs at the dozen tables.
It was also very loud, but Rock was nevertheless able to distinguish a recognizable voice ascend from the noise, which clearly belonged to John Finger, the loudest person he had ever known. Rock looked through the horde until he found Finger seated at one of the tables. One of Finger's many nieces was with him, a shy, demur teenager Rock had met at Finger's house the summer before, but her presence did not dampen Finger's typical shouts of profanity:"OH SHIT, HAS ANYONE TRIED THESE FUCKING WINGS? THEY'RE HOTTER THAN SHIT, AND WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T MIX THEM WITH THIS FUCKING WHISKEY. I'M FUCKING TELLING YOU, MY GUT FEELS LIKE IT'S ABOUT TO FUCKING EXPLODE."

Well centered

According to Rock's seemingly ethereal sources, the entire habitable earth was contained within the four walls of his house. At any rate, this is how he interpreted their signals when he first awoke.
It eventually became clearer to him that there were other homes in Levy.

Lost

After his car broke down, Rock realized he would have to walk to class, which was at a community college at the end of a complex route he had only travelled once before. Rock was soon lost and frustrated. It was crucial he not miss class, but he knew he had no way to find it, and that furthermore he didn't have enough information to ask anyone for directions. He couldn't remember the school's address or even its name.
As he wandered miles from his apartment, Rock stumbled upon a large group of Little Rock Hash House Harriers gathered in a mini-mart parking lot and was immediately relieved. He had found them at last, clearly from the start his single objective.

Bees

Rock sat in the passengers seat of an old, white, heavy-duty work van driven by his high school friend Mark Rogers. They were about to exit a U.S. Army post in Europe, distinguished like most by its ancient rock buildings, when Rogers came to a stop just short of a guard shack at the post's perimeter. Rock turned to see a bee fly out through the driver's side window and Rogers reach for his throat.
"Did that bee sting you?" Rock said. "Are you having a reaction?"
Rogers, in clear agony, nodded enough to affirm Rock's guess.

The Super Bowl

It was a comfortable, breezy winter afternoon. Rock was downtown, seated on a light wooden bar stool in the median of usually busy four-lane street, reading a tabloid story about the coming Super Bowl between the Seattle Seahawks and Arizona Cardinals.
There was no traffic and few people around, so Rock did not feel at all self conscious. His problem was with balance. Whereas the warm wind felt wonderful, it made it nearly impossible for him to remain on the stool for more than a few seconds.

Choices

The sandwich shop was at a downtown corner next to the newspaper, and the specials of the day were foot-long sliced beef and Italian sausage hoagies.
Rock walked to the shop and stared longingly at the meat. "I'm thinking about a combo deal here," he said to two teenage girls behind the counter, both of whom were instantly engaged. "Would you mind putting the sausage into the beef? Will the bun even close?"
A pretty brunette picked up a sausage from its bun and dropped it into a bun coated by juicy sliced beef. Rock took one look and said he would take it.
The other girl said it would cost twenty-four dollars. The brunette smiled and said, "I just checked. This is twelve-thousand calories."
Rock laughed at this expensive, fattening folly: "You know what, just give me the sausage."

Tennis

These people were all tennis experts. Rock understood he was not qualified to challenge their expertise, but he did anyway.
They sat around a card table in a dimly-lighted, paneled den and complained about how much tennis had changed. "It involves nothing but power now," one of the said. "The wonderful subtleties of finesse are gone."
"I hate to say it, but I haven't noticed," Rock said. "On the other hand, you have to bear in mind that I have never watched much more than the Sunday morning mens finals of Wimbledon."
"There's no way you could truly understand it then," another said.
"How about if they went back to wooden rackets?"
"That would do it, but there's no way that will ever happen. There's not a chance."

Sunday school

Rock walked into the enormous sanctuary a few minutes after his girlfriend Jennifer's adult Sunday School class had begun. About fifteen people were gathered on the front row of ornate, dark oak pews, or on several long rows of steps that led to the pulpit and choir area, or the ten-foot gap inbetween, carpeted in plush maroon.
The church's pastor Gregg Larson led the class, and Rock could see Larson's attention turn to him as he approached down the center aisle. Brother Gregg smiled and said, "Hey, look who's here. Rock himself."
There were smiling faces all around him, and Rock blushed from self-conscious embarrassment as he sat next to Jennifer on the soft carpet.
Larson held a tattered red umbrella, half opened over his head, but Rock's thoughts had been diverted by a distinct smell he recognized as his own unbathed crotch. It stunk as if he had not showered in days, and he assumed Jennifer also could smell it. He wished he could leave before anyone else noticed, but Rock knew any opportunity would be awkward at best.

The C word

Rumors out of Fayetteville, Arkansas, suggested Arkansas Razorbacks quarterback Buck Alexander was overheard by several reporters as he used a word that frequently offends and sometimes enrages women. Talk of this spread through the paper's sports section.
"I'll bet he said 'cunt,' " said Rock, who felt certain he'd nailed it.
Other staffers in the room agreed. They also laughed at Rock's idiosyncratic lack of reserve.
A senior editor asked Rock to turn the matter over to Linda Sadler, the paper's top investigative reporter. He walked into the newsroom toward Linda's desk and saw several reporters and editors rise from their desks and approach him, just as he would have predicted. He knew they were motivated by curiosity and that apparently the Alexander story was widespread.
"We think he used the 'C' word," Rock said.
As Linda responded, Rock heard murmurs erupt around him and spread through the room. Linda said she would look into it.
"Shit, we all knew it," one of the reporters said.
"And you were right," Linda said. She had confirmed it with her first telephone call, which took no more than a few seconds. "He indeed used the 'C' word."

Hot dogs

There were police cars everywhere. At least fifty of them drove in and out of the Levy precinct of the North Little Rock Police Department and the adjacent mini mart parking lot. Rock wasn't sure exactly what was up, but he was in the middle of it and knew it involved the Arkansas Travelers, a minor-league baseball team based in downtown North Little Rock.
Rock had been asked to investigate something involving the lack of promotion of hot dogs at Dickey-Stephens Field, the Travelers ball park, but found evidence of deeper trouble. It was currently beyond him, but it seemed there were underworld influences at play.
A contractor who worked out of Dickey-Stephens had contacted Rock months before to ask for his help in marketing his hot dogs, which he apparently sold throughout the season. Rock had ignored the request, and now with less than a month left in the season was receiving emails and letters from the man, and phone calls from numbers he didn't recognize.
Odd characters began to appear, middle-aged, hard-driven men, dressed in old blue jeans and khakis and sweat shirts or tattered wool sweaters, all of whom had dark conspiracies underway. Rock sat with one of them in an early-model Toyota Camry, dented and filthy inside and out, parked between the stream of police cars and the center of their attention, a two-story, dilapidated brick office building, from which Rock could see smoke begin to emerge. The man beside him wanted Rock to help him find something, but he couldn't remember what it was.

Something different

Rock woke up on Saturday morning to discover that his unpublished novel, A Different Closet, was posted on the Internet and that nearly everyone was talking about it. He lay on a narrow stretch of hardwood floor between his bed and the eastern wall of his house and could see paragraphs excerpted from it as they floated under the bed. Rock watched people examine them and took a close look himself. He could tell they were very good, even better than he originally thought.
Already, Rock was being hailed as the next great writer. He overheard a group of his high school classmates talking to Charlie Rose, the CBS and PBS talk-show host, and could tell that Rose was impressed. "It's a wonderful book," he said. "I'd love to have Rock on my show."

Rock knew for the first time that all of his daydreams had been vindicated. He thought he should get up from the floor and put on a pair of pants and a shirt for when people started to come by, and then that he better get to work on his final rewrite. He also knew he needed some grape juice.

Mobile home

A tornado churned through Little Rock the night before. It followed an easterly path along the Arkansas River, and Rock assessed the damage as he drove for a round of golf at First Tee.
He turned left toward the course through a lower-middle class neighborhood off Cantrell Boulevard. Many houses were heavily damaged. Some were destroyed. Rock noticed that a mobile home to his left, at the corner of Cantrell, had no more than minor damage. It looked as if a few hail stones had dented it. There was a for-sale sign in its tiny front yard, which obviously had been placed there since the night before.
Rock was curious, so he pulled over and knocked on the front door. A young woman let him in, and he saw that this ordinary trailer appeared much larger inside. It was plush and expertly furnished, absolutely lovely, Rock thought. The kitchen was huge.
"What are you asking for this?" Rock asked.
"We're hoping to get seventeen thousand," the young woman said.
Rock told her he was interested.

All you can eat

It had long been his favorite restaurant, and Rock was there with his mother, seated at a table with a view of Lake Hamilton.
On this occasion, however, he felt they had waited a bit too long for a server, who looked embarrassed when he finally arrived. "I'm so sorry, but we have a new policy," the server said. "If you're here for the all-you-can-eat buffet, you have to wait in line."
Rock turned to see fifty or more people gathered outside. "Oh, our mistake," he said.
After they walked out, Rock assumed they would go elsewhere rather than wait, so he walked to his car. Once there, he looked back for his mother, but she was out of sight. He walked back toward the restaurant and saw her exit from a door to the kitchen with two large plates of ham and fried eggs.
"Rock, if we go back to our table, these will make it look like we've already been served," she said.
"You know what, I don't think that will work," Rock said. "But I admire your effort."

Hurdle

The one-hundred-meter hurdles final for girls was a moment away, and Rock watched from the edge of the track as entrants completed their warmup rituals. One commanded his attention—a tall and lean, long-legged blonde who stood near her blocks. He thought she looked like a winner and wished there were someone he could tell about her.
It was the Arkansas high school Meet of Champs, and Rock's cat Pam had also qualified for the final, but Rock was so enthralled by the blonde that the idea his fourteen-year old cat was about to hurdle for a state championship failed to register. He wasn't looking for her and didn't notice whether she was there or not.
Once the race started, it was clear that the blonde was outmatched by everyone. She looked nearly frightened as she approached the first hurdle, which she failed by more than a foot to clear. Her lead leg in fact went under the board and she crashed to the track in a jumble of flesh and wood and aluminum.
The leaders struggled, too. By the seventh hurdle, everyone had fallen and several had abandoned the race. The problem became obvious to Rock: the hurdles were set as if the race were for men, or perhaps even higher.
"These hurdles aren't set right," Rock said to a man beside him.
"Yeah, they didn't change them after the boys race."
"How could they miss something like that?" Rock asked.
A few minutes later, Rock walked into a large olive-drab tent and was startled to see Pam stretched on her side on a canvas cot. She shook uncontrollably under a blood-soaked quilt and gasped breathlessly. There were large raw patches on her, including one on the side of her head that oozed blood. She and Rock were the only ones in the tent, and Rock was immediately angered. How could anyone have left her alone in this state?

High rise

Rock's friends Chris and Erin had moved from their home in Corpus Christi to a high rise luxury apartment in a major American city. He walked in to find them showing two couples around and joined in. It soon became obvious that Chris had done a lot of lovely work, particularly in the kitchen and on a large picture window that overlooked downtown.
Chris's and Erin's two children, a boy and girl aged about four and six respectively, where seated at the dining room table. Rock passed them as he walked into the kitchen to introduce himself to the couples.
One husband was enormous with a shaved head. Rock learned the other had a grotesquely deformed hand as he shook it. Two thirds of his right thumb were missing, and what remained had a jagged edge and looked as though it had been hollowed out.

Indy car

He didn't know where it came from, or why he was in it, but Rock drove an open-wheeled Indy-style car as fast as he could, west on Lockesburg Street in Nashville, Arkansas. He passed between his late grandparent's house and the old Scrapper Gymnasium and approached Fourth Street, one of the busiest streets in town, but it was late and he didn't consider stopping. He turned south onto Fourth and accelerated through the next stop sign at Sunset. Rock had never felt such power.

American Pharoah

They were on the track at Churchill Downs. Rock was with two associates from the newspaper, circulation men he had known for twenty or more years, routinely said hello to, but whose names he couldn't recall and perhaps had never known, and they stood no more than fifty yards from the wire on the outside edge of the track as horses turned for home in the Kentucky Derby.
None of them knew why they were there. They couldn't even remember arriving in Louisville, but Rock felt a thud of hooves in his feet and heard the crowd begin to roar and didn't need a reason.
It was clear to them all that one horse had a substantial lead and was beginning to pull away. "Man, I hope that's American Pharoah," Rock said.
"Oh yeah, me to," one of his associates said.
They couldn't hear a track announcer and didn't know the horse's colors, so they couldn't be sure until he at last ran past them, when Rock made out the name American Pharoah on the saddle cloth as it bounced by.

The bed

Kayce Smith's new apartment was in the dimly lighted and perpetually dank hallway of the newspaper's basement, near the library, which did not seem at all odd to Rock.

Kayce had asked him to come look at the new bed she bought for one of her children. It looked to him like nothing more than a typical bedroll, but Kayce insisted he give it try. Sure enough, when Rock stretched out on it he found it as comfortable as a bed could be.

As he lay on this oddity, the sports department clerk Anthony Peace walked by, headed for the library. Rock turned to say hello, but before he could speak, he noticed Kayce's boyfriend Dan Chaney playing cards with several men in a back room.

He had walked down this hall two or three times a week for nearly twenty years and had never before noticed the room.

An odd Thanksgiving

Jeff and Jill Krupshaw and their children had hosted a fun and sometimes rambunctious Thanksgiving dinner at their house as long as Rock had known them. It always featured tons of perfect food, mostly prepared by Jill, and then hours of football watching, but on this particular Thanksgiving, things really got crazy.
Rock was surprised to see that Dan, Jeff's and Jill's 24-year-old son, had hired two boxers to stage a fight after dinner. Dan had put a ring in one of his sister's bedrooms, and he and several of his friends gathered around it. Rock watched from the doorway to see two enormous, obese men, nearly asleep it appeared, lean against one another until one finally slid down the other to the mat. He looked dead, Rock thought.
The first football game was on. Everyone moved from the crazy boxing match to the den. Rock took a seat on the carpet. He felt very sleepy, until someone opened the front door and at least twenty deer fawns charged into the house. The acted like slightly tamer versions of the raptors from Jurassic Park, clawing and biting enough to frighten everyone.

Tip debate

Fifteen Little Rock Hash House Harriers, including Rock, sat together at a local restaurant to discuss their roles in an upcoming project. They left after an hour, during which none of them ordered anything, though a young blonde waitress came by every few minutes to refill their water glasses.
Rock was the last to get up and noticed that no one had left a tip, so he opened his billfold and reached for a twenty as the waitress approached.
"Here, this is for you," Rock said.
"Oh, that's really not necessary," she said.
"Sure it is."
He handed her the bill but noticed it was a five. "Wait," he said. "I meant to make that a twenty."
"Oh no," the waitress said. "That would be way too much."
"No. No, I insist. In my mind, a tip shouldn't always be calculated as a percentage of the check. I know we didn't order anything, but you did a lot for us. Please, take this."
Rock now held a twenty, but the waitress instead reached into his billfold and pulled out a ten.
"Let's compromise," she said. "This will be plenty."
Rock looked in frustration toward a graying middle-aged man seated at an adjacent table.
"I wouldn't argue with her," the man said. "You got no chance."

A big story

Everyone was talking about an apparent murder-suicide, including Rock, who sat in the drivers seat of his car beside a young African American woman he barely knew. It was late at night, and they were in a parking lot near Clinton National Airport in Little Rock.
The day before, someone found a prominent middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter shot to death at their home in a ritzy Little Rock neighborhood.
"I wonder which one was the murderer," the woman said.
"It's hard to know for sure, of course, but I think I'd lean toward the daughter," Rock said.
"Why?"
"I don't know. It's just a little harder for me to a imagine a woman killing her child than the other way around."
"Yeah, but like you said, we don't know the circumstances."

Sad meeting

Former Arkansas-Little Rock head men's basketball coaches Steve Shield and Porter Mozer were together at Oaklawn Park. Someone told Rock they were there, and he was pleased. He looked around and saw them standing together near trainer Red Hartledge's box in the indoor grandstands, twenty-feet above and sixty-feet away from the one-sixteenth pole on the track. Rock approached them and said hello, but they seemed displeased by the meeting. They each shook his hand but looked away and seemed dismissive, nearly contemptuous Rock thought.

Salads

Walt dug into a salad bar, and Rock joined him. They used tongs to place large wedges of grilled romaine on their platters and then worked their way through hundreds of items. Rock decided he wanted more than his plate could hold, so he pulled a container of radishes from the bar and dumped its contents into a trash receptacle. He then filled it with the lettuce and Italian dressing and noticed through the vacancy that there were an enormous collection of toasted croutons inside. He began to pile them on his salad.
Walt appeared shocked. "Fuck, man. What are you doing?"
Rock immediately became self conscious. A manager approached. "Sir, that is not allowed."
He took the container from Rock and began to shut down the salad bar.
"Rock, what were you thinking?" Walt said. "Shit, this tops everything."

The swim meet

Walt and Rock wanted to golf at Rebsamen Park, but about fifteen-hundred professional endurance swimmers were gathered on the grounds and in the new banquet facility recently constructed on part of the old short nine course. Golfers were lined up for tee times on the regular course, so Rock suggested Walt join him for a look through the new building. "I've never seen it," he said.
"I haven't either," Walt said. "Have you heard anything about it?"
"No. Nothing."
"I've heard it's great."
They walked in through large glass double doors and recognized immediately that this was no mere banquet hall. It was more like a mall, filled with shops and boutiques and bars and restaurants, and it was crowded with shoppers, many in swim suits. The entire vast building, which stretched a quarter of a mile north to the bank of the Arkansas River, was covered by a shaded sun roof and filled with trees and shrubbery and long rectangular rail planters full of flowers. There was nothing else like this in the Little Rock metro.
Walt and Rock were stunned.

Two months after the holidays

It seemed to Rock that if he put his television antenna on top of the Christmas tree, he might get a better picture on at least a few channels. He wondered why he hadn't thought of it before, and then why there was still a Christmas tree in his house. It was late February and, wait a minute, he had lived in this house for thirteen years and had never once put up a tree.
Something or someone at that very minute tipped over a vase on a mantle covered with Christmas decorations. Rock heard the sound and turned to see a candy bowl filled with peppermint sticks and water. He looked around toward nearby workers and asked, "Why is this stuff still up two months after the holidays?"
As was typical for Rock in this sort of circumstance, it didn't seem at all odd that his house had suddenly become a newspaper newsroom.

Worker's error

At last Rock seemed to understand why one of the knobs on the middle of three drawers to his nightstand was missing. Apparently a worker once fell to the floor and needed to remove the knob to get up, perhaps as long ago as 2002, when Rock moved into this house.
Rock could see it from the worker's perspective. He was on his bedroom rug with his face aimed at the knob, which was still in place but with a horizontal crack on the drawer underneath it. When he laid his head down, Rock's face was pointed under the bed, where he noticed a framed painting leaned against an old fryer basket. Of course, Rock could see what the worker had done. Apparently in his fall, which also destroyed a nightstand lamp, he had not only loosened the knob but also knocked the painting from the wall.
Eventually Rock knew the damage was his responsibility and had occurred in the daylight no more than a few minutes ago, not thirteen years earlier. Severely hypoglycemic, Rock couldn't stand and considered crawling to the kitchen for nourishment.

Super storm

Surely every television in this hotel were tuned to weather reports. Rock, BJ, and Z Man were in Africa, in their room on an upper floor that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean, and they knew they had waited too long. They expected and feared imminent disaster.
Meteorologists around the world had unanimously declared that the hurricane, which was currently no more than an hour from the hotel, was by far the most powerful anyone had ever measured.
BJ said their only chance was good luck.
"No shit," Rock said.
The weathermen explained on television how the hurricane would demolish everything along its path. They said it would travel deeply into Africa before it turned clockwise to return to the Atlantic, where it would regain strength as it headed toward North America.
"I mean, there's no point in our leaving now," BJ said. "Where would we go? The fucking jungle?"
"We'd probably drown, Z Man said.
"No, man, we would definitely drown," Rock said. "BJ's right. We're better off right here."

A new take

It was difficult to know how expensive this would be. Of course Rock knew his medical insurance would cover it, but he was nevertheless curious.
An entire floor of a large downtown office building was reserved to help insulin-dependent diabetics maintain healthy blood glucose levels. There were at least a hundred employees on the floor to monitor how their customers behaved and what they consumed. Everything was measured precisely. Rock took his usual morning dose of long-term insulin and was fed half a cup of walnuts and then asked to jog for two minutes. He would continue to exercise and to eat small measures of food throughout the day and to have his blood-glucose level checked at least hourly.
Rock knew he was hungry and hypoglycemic and that this was all unnecessary.

Too tall

It would be the tallest building in Arkansas, and Rock would oversee the people who built it.
Rock also hired a crew whose job was to confirm the building's height. This would require an electronic device designed to measure the pitch of tones, which Rock had determined were directly correlated to the height of physical structures. By the time the building was complete, the pitch should be high enough to render it nearly inaudible.
In this particular case, the pitch began to drive people mad. It was even bothersome to Rock as he slept at home, four miles from the construction site.

Play by play

Football season was finally at hand, and Rock sat with two friends in one of their apartments to watch the season opener on television.
Rock asked his friends whether they had ever listened to a game on the radio while driving and become so immersed in the broadcast that the inside of their car became the stadium itself. They both said it was a common experience for them.
"It's an amazing thing," Rock said. "I just love to hear the voice of a good radio man paint the picture: 'Johnson steps back into the pocket. There's pressure to his right. He scrambles further back, still looking downfield, and he has Ferguson wide open on a fly pattern thirty yards away, and the deep pass finds him. Ferguson makes the catch and has clear sailing to the end zone.' "

Time travel

Rock read the date on his wrist watch and thought 8-31 meant August, 2031. He sat on his couch and turned on the television to see Perry Mason on MeTV and was surprised that reruns of the show were still on sixteen years in the future.
This was before a small PayDay bar began to register, though Rock still needed to see a frozen-pizza box from the night before in his kitchen to confirm that he had not traveled forward in time. With that, he realized he was thirty minutes late for a walk with the Geezers.

New club

This was unlike any golf club Rock had seen. He was visiting his old friends Chris and Erin, who recently moved into the two-story house in Russellville, Arkansas, that belonged throughout Rock's youth to his aunt and uncle Jean and Jim Aikman. They were in the den on the ground floor when Chris handed him the new, very odd Taylormade three-wood.
Its  triangular shaft was nearly two inches thick, and the club head, which was no more than an inch high and and perhaps two inches wide, was attached to it with two inches of soft rubber. Rock waggled it and watched the club head sway back and forth. "Have you used this?" he asked Chris.
"Yeah, but I can't do anything with it."
They walked into the back yard, where Rock teed up a ball. With an easy, relaxed swing he hit it one-hundred and fifty yards at most. "Well, it's not going to help my game," he said. "I wonder how this works for anyone."

Bad driving

Kelly was back in town and just as beautiful to Rock as she had looked in a recent Facebook photograph (she was much prettier than Rock remembered from more than fifteen years earlier when they dated, though he thought she was lovely from the start). A large group of Kelly's friends had come to meet her and Rock, and they gathered in a parking lot connected to a levy.
Rock only recognized two of the roughly ten people who had come. One was another former girlfriend and the other a forty-year-old man Rock had worked with at the paper named Nick Walker.
Somehow the crowd managed to cram into Kelly's sleek Volvo station wagon.
Even before they drove away, it was clear to Rock that his two ex-girlfriends were vying for his attention and thoughts, a recognition that clearly pleased him.
Kelly took an off ramp to descend to a road that ran along the base of the levy, and the car quickly accelerated. Rock was not particularly alarmed until he realized the car had nearly approached its top speed, a hundred miles an hour at least. Kelly drove directly up the side of the levy, and the car was suddenly airborne. It went straight up, maybe a hundred feet, and Rock and everyone else were in a state of pure panic. The car then dropped straight back down until its trunk stuck into the levy like an axe swung into a log.
Rock did not feel at all injured. Everyone else also seemed fine. He stepped from the car and began to walk back toward where they had started, about a half mile away.
"Rock, where are you going?" Nick said.
"Fuck it," Rock said. "I'm not getting back in that car. I'm going home."

No need to wait

A small group of Little Rock Hashers, including Rock, sat on a rock wall built along a sidewalk that stretched across a large college campus. They were there with about twenty other Hashers from Texas and Missouri, and they had stopped on their run to rest and drink cans of cheap beer.
Rock sat on a rock bowl shaped exactly like a commode. In fact, as he looked more closely, he realized it was indeed a commode right there in public view. There was a roll of toilet paper with it.
Without further hesitation, Rock moved his bowels.
Barbara Southlerland, a longtime Little Rock Hasher seated several feet away and below Rock looked around and said, "All right, who let the fart?"
Rock explained. "It's not a fart, Barbara. I'm taking a shit."
At that very moment, one of the dogs with them stuck his head in the commode and removed a soiled wad of toilet paper, and then walked away into the large plot of rich green grass behind them. He dropped the paper and began to play with it, which drew attention from hundreds of students walking past and gathered between classes.

Big stakes

Rock and his cat Jo were held responsible for life on earth. It seemed insane to Rock that someone had organized this collusion and that the survival of mankind depended on it, but all he knew for certain was that his blood glucose level was far too low to determine what steps he would need to take, so he reached into the chest-of-drawers in his back bedroom for a tube of energy gel.
A few minutes later Rock realized it was Wednesday morning. Daylight had begun to spill into his front rooms, and it and the sugar brought clarity and relief. Neither he nor Jo would need to do anything for the immediate sake of anyone.

Senior Olympics

It surprised Rock to find that he could sprint so easily. There was a track meet underway in the stadium across the street from the football practice field where he had just made this discovery, which he would later assess as a freakish coincidence, and he consequently decided to enter the 100-meter dash.
The meet was for open competition when Rock signed up, and as he jogged around the track, he saw teams from Russellville High School and Gardner Junior High in the bleachers with Don Carnahan, his coach from high school. But bit by bit it became apparent that he was about to compete against people his age or older. Furthermore, whereas Rock at first thought he was in Pine Bluff, it suddenly became obvious that he was at Holt Field in Hot Springs. He had been there many times since his first visit in 1974. This must be the Senior Olympics, he decided.
Rock ran the 100 in 16.1 seconds but was forever unsure of his order of finish.

The Clearfork building

There is a camp on the eastern edge of the Ouachita Mountains, halfway between Hot Springs and Mount Ida, called Camp Clearfork. Rock was there for about the fifteenth time with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers and was inside a building he had never before examined. It was huge, indeed mountainous, larger inside than anything Rock had seen, or imagined. He was several thousand feet above the camp, wandering around what looked like ruins from a prehistoric town. He could see Hashers below, tiny as they sat at picnic tables and in foldout chairs in the shade of tall evergreens and oaks by the camp's large blue lake.
Dozens of other Hashers had climbed near the top of the building and moved along the the narrow and steep stone stairwells and across swinging bridges made of rope and wood.
Rock spotted his friend Zach far below.
"Hey Zach," he shouted as loudly as he could. "Thanks for that goddamn blowjob."
He heard laughter dampened by the distance as it echoed up from the camp.

No credentials

This was the first time Rock had seen George Schroeder since they worked together at the paper nearly twenty years earlier. Schroeder covers college football for USA Today, and Rock sat beside him on the grass surface of a football field minutes before a game was to kickoff.
It seemed odd to Rock to have players run around above him. Schroeder and he apparently looked odd to the policeman who approached them.
"What are you guys doing down there?" he said.
Rock looked for his press pass but knew as he did that he didn't have one. Neither did Schroeder.
"I'll tell you what, we don't have passes, but we're supposed to be here," Rock said.
"He's right," Schroeder said. "We're both here to cover the game."
The cop adopted a large smile that almost appeared contemptuous. Rock assumed he would ask them to leave. Instead he said, "Ah, hell, you guys are fine. Have a good day."

New world

Something or someone had reconstituted the way modern man views the world in terms of time, so that from whatever point we happen to inhabit we no longer have a chance to progress. We must stay where we are, at least in time. It was unclear how that might bear on our day-to-day existence and ability to succeed or fail, but it seemed the general concepts of matters such as adventure and pleasure would be limited.
Rock's first experience with this involved a baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds. He was apparently destined to know no more than the score after eight innings, so consequently to never know how the 3-3 tie was resolved.

Drunk drivers

One of the KATV Channel 7 news anchors decided to randomly test local celebrities for drunk driving and decided to use Rock's den and MacBook Pro for his testing.
Rock vehemently disapproved and consequently ushered the young man and two young news women from his house. He then sat on his couch with Jo the cat and wondered what the fuck all that was about.

Golf match

An indoor match between professional golfers Tiger Woods and Stacy Lewis was down to the final few putts. In order to win, Woods needed to sink putts of two and five feet. If he missed either, Lewis would win if she sunk her two-footer.
The 18th green was in Rock's back bedroom, and Rock was there with longtime acquaintance Bill Vickery. They had bet thirty-five dollars on the match; Rock took Woods but woke up before the contest was settled. He sat on his couch for a minute or two before he realized there was no money to collect or lose and that the golfers and Vickery were not in his house.

The hearing

Tom Jennings didn't seem like the sort capable of murder but nevertheless faced a hearing that would decide whether or not he would stand trail for exactly that. He was accused of killing a man whose body was seated in chair in the crowded courtroom.
Tom was Rock's next-door neighbor, and Rock was there to watch the results of his hearing. He spoke with Tom the day before and noticed an almost utter lack of concern. Tom was no killer, he knew.
What was oddest about this procedure was the dead man. Someone wondered aloud when the room would begin to smell of death.

Tryout

His quarterbacking days were long past. Rock hadn't thrown a football in at least ten years, and he remembered that his last attempt was feeble at best. Nevertheless, someone asked if he would help split time with a professional quarterback at a tryout for wide receivers.
They were gathered in an indoor facility about the size of a basketball court. Athletic equipment was spread everywhere, including dozens of blocking sleds and tackling dummies. There were about twenty receivers on hand, and Rock watched as the pro hit them in stride with each pass.
Then it was Rock's turn. He threw several passes, none of which came close, until his final, which found an overweight, middle-aged white man running a post pattern, but the pass surprised the receiver and he let it drop to the turf.
"You got a little anxious on that one, Rock," the pro quarterback said. "You let it go too soon."
Rock agreed. His pass arrived at the receiver's shoulder just as he turned to look for it.

CPR

Everyone should learn CPR. Rock swore that would become his crusade after he watched helplessly as a man died at his feet.
Rock had gone to the Democrat Building in downtown Little Rock to visit his former boss Jeff Krupsaw, but before he made it to Jeff's desk, and after he walked out of the stairwell into a hall on the third floor, he saw an old acquaintance he'd known for more than thirty years. Typical of those sorts of characters from Rock's past, he had no idea what his name was but recognized him immediately and remembered that they had always been on friendly terms.
The man was perhaps two sentences into a story about something Rock would never be able to recall when he reached for his chest. He struggled to continue his story, and then paused, and virtually collapsed into small leather desk chair.
Rock felt panic rise. "Should I call for an ambulance?"
The man nodded yes, and Rock pulled out his cell phone to call 911. He screamed, "Does anyone know CPR? Please, does anyone here know CPR?"
Rock's stricken acquaintance stood from the chair and collapsed to the old tile floor near a large, wooden blackboard, just before a young, slightly overweight blonde woman walked past.
She looked at Rock and smiled, then quickly walked by as though nothing out of the ordinary was underway.

Rock is fat

Rock started a diet several days ago, but it has yet to pay off. Further inspiration came when he ran into Little Rock radio talk-show host Tommy Smith and several of his cohorts from the Buzz's Show with No Name.
"Hey Rock," Tommy said. "Good to see you, man."
"Heck, it's good to see you, too, Tommy."
Tommy shook his head and laughed. "Jesus, man, I can see you been packing it away, just like the rest of us."
Rock looked at his midsection. "No shit, man. I've been on a cheesecake and milkshake diet."
"It looks like it's working," Tommy said.

The wrong way

Basil Julian had driven with Rock from Magnolia, a small college town in southwestern Arkansas, to Prescott, an even smaller town forty-five miles away. When they attempted to return to Magnolia, Rock could tell something wasn't right. Basil was driving in reverse down the highway at full speed, which made it seem to Rock as if they had taken the wrong highway.
"Are you sure we're on the right road?" Rock said.
"No, I'm never sure of anything, but I think we are."
A couple of minutes later they arrived at an intersection that looked completely unfamiliar to Rock. "Man, we're on the wrong road."
That had also become obvious to Basil. "Yeah, you're right. We gotta go back."

The railway bridge

Rock was struggling with his balance on the railway bridge, far above a rocky canyon, and in an instant realized he was horizontal, stretched out between a railroad boxcar and the edge of the track. A very tall man was with him, and he also wore running clothes. Rock consequently assumed he was on a run with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers.

An odd assignment

Jeff Krupsaw called Rock from the paper to ask if he would watch a specific football game on television and write a game story. Rock agreed, but shortly thereafter he awoke and walked into his den. He wondered what game Jeff had asked about. He turned on his television and found one but was too sleepy to watch, so he went back to bed and slept for another hour and a half.
Rock woke up at about 1:45 p.m. and walked back to his den. He looked for the game again but couldn't find it. About a half an hour passed before Rock grew certain that Krupsaw had not truly asked him to watch a football game. Among the factors that convinced him were that the coming football season was still a little more than a month away.

Deadra and the diner

Rock was in a neighborhood park somewhere in Little Rock when he met an overweight young African-American woman named Deadra. She commented immediately on the cats who had gathered nearby, and Rock was happy to say that one of them was his. "She's gray on top and white on the bottom, the little one there in the back," he said. "Her name's Jo."
"Look, there's a racoon with them," Deadra said.
She said she wanted to see the cats run around instead of just sitting in one place, but for the next few minutes Rock noticed they only moved when Deadra wasn't looking.
There was a classic diner across the street, tucked right in with the neighborhood's baby-boomer 1950s brick houses, the sort Rock's young professional acquaintances tended to buy. It looked as if someone had dipped the diner in pink stucco many years earlier, back when they were common and popular. Rock couldn't wait to go inside.
Deadra agreed to split a peanut butter sandwich with him. He also ordered two diet Cokes. As they waited, Rock's mind wandered off into a scenario in which he was given the opportunity to lie on sheets that had a thread-count of one-hundred thousand. Afterward he joked that he had sex on them with the AT&T girl: "I came inside her and failed to notice."

Pool party

It was the day before Rock's longtime friends Tom and Corky Zaluedek were moving out of their house, and they were about to host a pool party for the Little Rock Hash House Harriers.
Rock arrived early and had to urinate, but all of the bathrooms had been shut down or boarded up. He wandered to the back bedroom that Tom and Corky shared, where he found Corky alone. He asked her what he should do.
"Don't tell anyone, but we've been using the swimming pool," Corky said.
When Rock arrived poolside, he saw that the water was brownish and murky, as if it belonged in a farm pond. Getting into the water was out of the question, but the backyard was unfenced, and he was too self-conscious to simply pee into the pool from the side. There had to be another place.

Jackie

They were students in a trade school of some sort when Rock ran into a former high school classmate named Jackie Hill. Within a day or so they had rekindled their friendship.
As they sat beside each other in a break room, Rock placed a palm on the back of Jackie's head. "You know what, your hair looks nicer now, at fifty-six, than it did when you were a teenager," Rock said.
Young women in the room were clearly impressed by Rock's kind words.

Odd press box

Only people seated on the first row of the press box could see the basketball court, which meant that only three or four people had more than an idea of what was happening.
Rock was there with old friends Chris and Erin, but the lack of a good view meant little to him. He wasn't there to write a game story, only a sidebar for which he already had all the information needed. The Vratils didn't care, either. In fact, they knew several of the sportswriters, young men they had befriended ten years earlier when they lived in Springdale, Arkansas. It was clear to Rock that his friends were having tremendous, loud fun as they reminisced about good times they had in Springdale.

Money from above

Jesus Christ agreed to give Rock five-thousand dollars if the next guest to spend a night in Rock's house in some way praised a Biblical deity upon awakening.
The next quest of Rock's was a bald-headed, middle-aged man who managed the Academy Sports franchise in Sherwood, but Rock failed to record his words the morning he woke up. Jesus agreed to help Rock with time travel, which would of course be required in order to establish whether than man had indeed said, "Praise the lord," as Rock claimed.

A long ride

It seemed to take forever. Rock volunteered to help a neighbor get home to Lubbock, Texas, and then found out the trip would include two five-hundred mile rides on a large and loud, very powerful motorcycle. He had to be taught to ride it, but after one trip, insisted on taking his car, a relatively plush Chevrolet Impala.
Rock climbed into bed with his cat Jo after the final drive and realized he was absolutely exhausted.

An authur's age

The publishing firm asked Rock to determine the age of its authors, but his only gauge was their physical appearance, and the only evidence he had was a stack of mug shots. He thought they all looked younger than thirty.

Stab wounds

He was on a sidewalk in front of a bar in an old, rundown former warehouse district in east Little Rock when Rock saw several men apprehend Ashley, a woman he had known ten years earlier. One of the men picked her up and put her on the back of a flatbed truck. Another pulled out a large kitchen knife and stuck it into one of her thighs several times, directly through her blue jeans.
As Ashley screamed and struggled, Rock hurried in horror into the smokey bar, which was crowded with bedraggled, middle-aged men. "I need a knife. Someone please get me the largest, sharpest kitchen knife you can find," said Rock, who was already ashamed of his cowardice.

Grilled chicken

Friends and their pets were packed in Rock's house, which was far too hot. His had spent the night grilling chicken, and the coals had done a better job heating his house than cooking the thick chicken breasts. They were only now, at daybreak, beginning to reach a point where they were safe to eat.

Exploitation

Someone lent Todd Traub a small airplane, and he used it to fly Rock across the sparse, dusty terrain near Oklahoma City. They were there to attend the Great American Conference preseason football meetings.
Todd landed the plane in the parking lot of Mexican restaurant, which he and Rock entered to see four sexy and scantily clad Latino women standing on the edge of section of tables two steps higher than the majority of seating in the restaurant. There were several women from the conference who had gathered nearby to complain.
"This is exploitation, pure and simple," one of them said.
They all agreed. Todd and Rock did not, and in fact struck up a conversation with the women who had caught their attention in the first place.

Booze

It disappointed Rock to read that his old friend Kelly Bass had been dismissed from Harding University's football team for excessive drinking. Apparently school officials ran tests that confirmed Kelly had consumed an average of six beers a day over the previous month.
What disturbed Rock even more was a montage of photographs the paper ran on the jump page. It showed hundreds of former Arkansas athletes, each with either a drink or marijuana in their hands. There was one of Rock, taken twenty-two years earlier, as he drew pot smoke from a joint in front of Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati.

First strip act

It was one of those fund-raisers Rock loved. He knew on a first-name basis at least a quarter of the roughly two-hundred people gathered at First Tee of Little Rock to raise money for the club, which claims to target underprivileged children for its lessons in golf and life.
Everyone there acted as if they were happy as hell to see everyone else. There were big smiles all around as Rock stepped from the A-framed pro shop toward the driving range, where several PGA Tour players with local connections were teaching a few of the children gathered around the range.
After an hour or so of pure entertainment, Rock walked from the practice range and through the First Tee building to the parking lot. At some point, for a reason he would never know, Rock took off his white long-sleeve T-shirt, an act he wasn't even aware of until he suddenly found himself beside his car with the shirt in his right hand. He heard people laughing, surely at him he supposed.
Rock immediately put the shirt back on and drove away as quickly as possible. He wondered on the way home when he took the shirt off and how many people had seen him, and furthermore whether he was losing his mind.

Gym cats

Rock felt as though he were stuck, perhaps for the rest of his life, in a zone that extended from his bedrooms to the exterior door of his back porch.
While on his bed, all he could do was watch a video display of cats playing basketball. Once he made it to his couch he could also attempt to read email on his laptop, but no matter where he was, Rock wondered how long this condition would persist and when his essential supplies would run out.
After the second tube of energy gel registered, Rock was fine, and awake. He was also very hungry.

Mankind at risk

When Rock woke up, he was on his back on the rug in his back bedroom. He knew he had just worked out a deal that would cause the end of the earth and mankind if he were to repeat his first move of the day. Unfortunately, he wasn't sure what it was, so he was afraid to move at all.
After approximately ten minutes, Rock decided to walk to his refrigerator and eat something. Once there, he chose apple sauce and ate it directly from the container with a table spoon. Rock was pretty sure he'd never done that before

Abandoned furniture

It confused Rock to be awakened from a nap by a garbage truck parked in his front yard. He stepped onto his porch to see why it was there and noticed a wooden shipping crate and piles of boards he assumed had come from other crates. As the driver finished picking the wood from his lawn, Rock saw that his cat Pam had run under the front of the truck.
Rock ran to the cab and asked the driver to wait. "My cat's under your truck. Hold on until I can get her, would you."
With very little encouragement from Rock, Pam scurried away and across his yard into the street.
"Thanks a lot, man," Rock said.
"Yeah, no problem," the driver said. He drove away across the edge of the driveway, and Rock noticed something crazy. Behind his cars on the driveway were several large pieces of furniture, apparently new. Rock knew his house had no room nor need for more furniture, so he began to stack it on the edge of the street, frustrated that it would sit there for a week before the truck returned.

Harding

Rock was on the campus of Harding University for the first time since the late spring of 2007. He was there to attend a basketball game but while wandering through the hallway of Rhodes Fieldhouse ran into the head football coach.
"Coach, it's good to see you," Rock said. "Oh, and by the way, congratulations on your championship. I just found out about it."
Harding's football team won the NCAA Division II championship in 2008, or maybe 2009, but Rock had been unaware of it until minutes before he talked to the coach, when he saw the trophy and other tributes on display in Rhodes.

The bench

Rock literally had no idea why he was a college basketball coach, but suddenly he was. He awoke to this realization with a couple of minutes left in a game.
His team had an insurmountable lead, and it occurred to Rock that he should probably take his starters out. He turned to the bench. He didn't know anyone's name. No one looked familiar to him, so he asked the nearest player for help.
"What's the blonde-headed guy's name?" Rock said.
The player looked confused. "Coach, that's Larry. How could you not know?"

Bertrando

The Kentucky Derby was a few days away, and Rock was back in the barns at Churchill Downs, seated in an old, flimsy aluminum folding chair in front of several contenders.
Bertrando, a tall white colt with yellow splotches, was among them and stood out for Rock in size alone. His head was particularly enormous.
It was late in the afternoon and Rock watched as Bertrando stretched out in front of him until his head was beside the chair. The colt then leaned it against Rock's left shoulder and closed his eyes and was almost instantly asleep.

Clothes day

There was no way to know why, but Rock was up early to return as a student to Russellville High School. He put on a light blue, oxford cloth shirt, and noticed it was stained, and next that the collar of his white undershirt was ragged and frayed and yellowed.
Rock's mother was at his house.
"Mom, I have to get some new clothes," he said. "When I get home this afternoon, I'm going shopping."

Panic

They were out on a bright blue morning, a two-minute walk from their one-floor apartment building on the south edge of downtown Little Rock. Rock was with Pam, the cute character from the sitcom The Office, when they suddenly saw from several blocks away hundreds of people running directly away from the center of downtown.
Rock felt fear surge.
"What are they running from?" Pam said. "What should we do?"
Rock considered joining the crowd in its flight but decided instead to go indoors. "Let's go to your apartment," he said. "We should be safe there."

Blocked exit

The original exit for the Blackwell liquor store on I-40 had been closed for years, so Rock was surprised when his high school track coach Don Carnahan slowed almost to a stop to take it.
He was surprised not only that Carnahan didn't realize the exit was closed but also that he would want to go to a liquor store. Rock had known Carnahan for a little more than forty years and had never known him to drink.
"Coach, I hate to tell you, but that exit's been closed for at least fifteen years, maybe more," Rock said.
Carnahan backed away from the fence that sealed the exit and returned to the flow of traffic. "I don't think it's been closed that long," he said.

Jen

It had been fourteen years since Rock last saw his ex-girlfriend Jen, but he suddenly found himself in her small one-room house with her husband Dave and teenage step-son.
Their house was in a poor, working-class neighborhood in Little Rock, and Rock listened as Jen and the boy complained about Dave.
"I've been trying to get Jen to leave him for me," the boy said.
"To tell you the truth, I've considered it," Jen said.
This stunned Rock, almost as much as Jen's appearance when they were reintroduced after so many years. She was no longer thin nor pretty. Her face was bloated and weathered and pocked in a way that made her look as if she were poorly nourished and a heavy drinker.

Telephone bill

This was hard for Rock to figure. Apparently he had made a phone call late at night to the old Aikman house in Russellville and then failed to hang up, or something like that. All he knew is that someone told him the Aikman's had been informed that he was responsible for a fraud charge of three-thousand dollars, payable to AT&T.
Rock was awake for nearly an hour before he knew for sure he didn't owe anyone any money.

Exposure

There were so many people in the clubhouse that they had to put two Porta Potties near the restaurant and bar. Hundreds were there for a golf tournament, including Rock, who stood in line for one of the toilets.
As soon as he stepped up and into it, Rock noticed that he was exposed to people in the pro shop. A gap in the back of the plastic shell of the toilet required him to leave the seat raised and step to one side to keep from displaying himself to passersby.
Rock stepped out and told the woman in line behind him what what he had just experienced. "You might want to consider something else," he said.
"Yes," she said. "I believe I will."

Church repairs

Their goal from the start was to finish construction of Rock's pulpit just before he got up from a night's sleep to preach, and they reached it. Rock was amazed. The moment he woke up, workers and handymen were leaving his back bedroom and the new stage and pulpit they had spent the night building. They had also built a huge gymnasium in his backyard.

Seafood

Rock was near the buffet in an all-you-can-eat seafood pavilion on the Riverfront Pier, the latest edition to Little Rock's River Market district, when he saw Steve Sullivan, the lead sports anchor for a local television station. He had known Sullivan for twenty-five years, since a story he wrote about him appeared in the local paper.
They smiled, shook hands, spoke the required greetings, and went about loading their plates. Rock had loved shell fish throughout his life and was therefore captivated by the piles of crab, lobster, oysters, and shrimp in the buffet's large shiny food wells. He reached for a handful of crab claws, cracked one, and was stunned to see literally gallons of hot, murky liquid practically gush from it across the buffet and floor.
But Rock's initial surprise was far surpassed when Sullivan dropped to the floor and began vomiting the same sort of liquid. He threw up vigorously at first, for fifteen seconds or so, but the volume decreased incrementally until, after about a minute, he seemed recovered from all but stark embarrassment.
Rock reached for an arm as Sullivan began to rise.
"Oh, god, that was awful," Sullivan said. "I really put on a show, didn't I?"
"Steve, man, don't worry about it," Rock said. "Heck, that's happened to all of us."

Odds

It seemed to Rock as if it would be a simple matter to find Kentucky Derby odds on his watch. He clicked through all of its functions and could find nothing. The race was a week away, or maybe two. No. A week. It was well past daybreak before he remembered that post positions had not yet been drawn.

Susie

Susie was the only one there. Rock expected to see a crowd of Little Rock Hashers when he walked into this Pizza Hut way out in southwest Little Rock, but he had not imagined Susie would be part of it. After all, she moved away to North Carolina with her new girlfriend nearly a year ago. Rock hadn't seen her in six months, and here she was, alone at a fucking Pizza Hut Rock didn't know existed until he saw on Facebook that it was where the Hashers planned to meet.
He was surprised but also pleased. "Susie, wow, where did you come from?"
"Hey, Rock." She stood for a mandatory hug. "How are you, man?"
Susie declared she was lesbian when she was seventeen, twenty years earlier, and on the evening of her eighteenth birthday, moved from Elaine's house to her first girlfriend's apartment. Within three or four years, Susie, seemingly by choice, became fat. Occasionally she would train rigorously and lose enough weight to complete an ultra-distance race, ranging from fifty kilometers to one-hundred miles, but even then was chunky at best. A friend of Rock's said she was built like a torpedo. Rock said she looked like an NFL lineman.
But not tonight. Susie had lost at least fifty pounds since Rock last saw her. He noticed the change in her face before she rose for the hug and then felt it with his hands.
"Susie, you look great," Rock said.
"Thanks, Rock, so do you. Are you ready to get it on?"
"Do what?"
She was suddenly the teenager who proposed to Rock one night when she and her parents met him by accident in a North Little Rock Wendy's.
"You heard me." Susie stood from the table and zipped up her weather-resistant running jacket. "Let's get out of here before anyone else shows up. Are your sheets clean?"

Mr. Sparky

It was Steve Edward's birthday, and Rock was at a party at Steve's home in Florida when someone joked about the old cars Steve always drove.
"Shit, man, I rode in the oldest of the bunch," Rock said. "It was an AMC of some sort, right Steve? From the fucking 60's."
"No, Rock, it was a Dodge," Steve said.
"Sure, sure, right. You called it Mr. Sparky. I'll never forgot that night, you remember, in 1989, after we'd been drinking all night at that Razorback game. We saw that cop on JFK, and you go, 'FUCK! COP!', and then immediately plow into Cathy Simpson's front yard."

A daydream revisited

Daydreams of fame for Rock always included an enjoyment he imagined faraway people from his past might feel or express once they were exposed to it. They would say things like, Hey, did you see what Rock did? Did you read about Rock in the paper? Have you seen his book? For god's sake, I saw Rock on TV last night!
Now his daydream had arrived; Rock was a star in two professional sports. He played a great game at quarterback the night before and was on a bus to play baseball when he saw two such people, in this case longtime dear friends—Erin, a tiny and pretty thirty-four year-old Alaskan native, nearly Asian in appearance, with whom he ran two marathons in Little Rock a decade earlier, and Kurt Wagner, a fifty-five year-old pot-bellied shaggy blonde who ran track with Rock at a high school in Arkansas, but had lived in Phoenix for nearly twenty years. It was clear to Rock that they were elated to see him and to at last meet one another, and he shared their pleasure.
"You're the Run and Puke Kid, aren't you?" Erin knew and beamed at the wonder of this meeting, just as Rock would have predicted. He knew stories of the Run and Puke Kid were a small but significant part of her past with him.
Kurt was noted in college for his propensity to vomit after long, hard runs, and he feigned embarrassment to hear it recalled. "Shit, dude, when are you gonna let that drop?" And then, "Erin, it's great to meet you. Rock used to talk about you a lot."
Rock was overjoyed, and it didn't occur to him until several hours after he checked into his room that neither Erin nor Kurt had spoken of his new stardom.

The party

The directions were simple: go north on Duncan Street, and the party's at the 10th house on the left. At least they seemed simple, but Rock got confused by the mixture of condominiums and houses that were all exactly the same size. They were each two stories tall, no more than twenty feet wide and painted white, with black tile roofs.
They were packed together on tiny lawns, like the houses Rock remembered from the Hill in St. Louis. He counted ten, but no one answered when he knocked. Rock thought he might be a little early and decided to walk around the neighborhood for a while.
After his thirty-minute walk, during which Rock noticed every house was constructed and decorated the same as the ones on Duncan, he walked by the house and knocked again.
A slightly overweight but otherwise lovely, young brunette answered and invited Rock in. There were five other women in the front room, all of whom Rock assumed were students at the local college a couple of blocks away. It almost immediately occurred to Rock that he had never seen any of these women, though they seemed pleased he was there.
"Wait minute," Rock said. "Are we on Duncan Street?"
"No, we're not," the brunette said. "Duncan's a block that way. Are looking for the party?"
"I was, yes. I was looking for a party."
"Well, great, we're going there in just a minute. Why don't you come with us?"

Cats

There were three mutilated cats, damaged in horrendous ways, gathered on the wide and cracked railing of an old concrete bridge on the edge of a small town. One of the cat's eyes were gouged out, hanging an inch or more from their sockets on fine, bloody strands of muscle. Another looked as if its mouth had been yanked out by a powerful hand. There was nothing but a bloody, jagged hole below its nose. The third lay on its side, with both front legs gone, seemingly pulled off by sudden, tremendous force from its front shoulders, and blood poured from the sheered sockets.
Rock was horrified.

Derby prospects

Rock stood with an acquaintance from the Little Rock Hash House Harriers in a stable at Churchill Downs. Emon Mahony, the Hasher, knew almost nothing about thoroughbred racing, but Rock didn't have time to explain much to him. He was too busy with his analysis of the upcoming Kentucky Derby.
It was late at night, and the stable was dark, its only light provided by a dim light bulb that hung bare on a short wire. Rock told Emon how he had been in this same stall a couple of weeks earlier with several owners and trainers as they tried to determine the source of some very foul smelling flatulence. It could have come from one or more of the men or perhaps from the small animals with them. There was a squirrel, a raccoon, and a possum squatting on a warped shelf that was cluttered with bottles of liniment and dirty towels and brushes and rope and dozens of other items irregularly and unintentionally stacked among dust and cobwebs to represent the life and history of the barn, which Rock figured was at least fifty years old.
Rock was frustrated by questions he had left unanswered during the Oaklawn Park season. For instance, how did Far Right, second in the Arkansas Derby, get his name? Why did the owner of American Pharoah, the Arkansas Derby winner, misspell Pharaoh? And why hadn't he pressed Hall of Fame trainer Wayne Lukas after Lukas told him Mr. Z, third in the Ark Derby, didn't drift at all in the Southwest Stakes?

Mashed potatoes

As Rock rummaged through a display of golf shorts at a department store, he noticed that Russian premier Vladimir Putin was at the opposite end of the same display, five feet to his left.
"You should check these down here," Putin said to him. "They are a very low priced."
"Thanks, I'll give them a look," Rock said.
Rock next walked from the store directly into his maternal grandmother's house. It did not seem at all odd to him that the two were connected. He sat at the dining room table with his grandmother, his mother, and his mother's identical twin sister Jean.
His grandmother put a large serving of mashed potatoes in a bowl in front of Rock, and then smothered it in cream gravy, but just before Rock dug in, his mother picked up an entire stick of butter from a butter dish and dropped it with her hand directly into the middle of Rock's potatoes.
"Mom, why did you do that?" said Rock as he used a fork to remove the butter. "It seems like something an insane person would do."

Stand up

Rock's stand-up routine was completely improvised, and from the start he had a jam-packed crowd of college kids and Hash House Harriers laughing hysterically. There were a thousand or so in the small, dark auditorium as Rock began.
"OK, y'all, let's see if I can't be funnier than two motherfuckers for a little while."
Afterward he and Hashing buddies Kayce Smith and Emon Mahony ate at a Subway, where the clerk explained to them that they would have to wait for the bread to finish baking before he could make their sandwiches.
Rock told him it was the best thing he could've said. Kayce agreed.
The sandwiches were fantastic.

Basketball

This was Rock's first pickup basketball game in 27 years, and within a minute he realized why he had quit playing. He sucked. He had trouble dribbling and couldn't shoot at all.

War Memorial Stadium

There was a metal cover built around the west corner of the south end zone at War Memorial Stadium, apparently put there Rock supposed to protect the vast array of tools spread across the grass near the sideline.
Rock watched as a crew quickly brought down the cover. It was nearly time for kickoff of the Arkansas Razorbacks' 2015 season-opener, but Rock wondered why the steel and brass tools still lay in the grass. They presented a clear danger to players.

Beat the Streak

Rock and Erin agreed to drive their cars from downtown Little Rock across the Arkansas River to a bar and restaurant in North Little Rock, but as they walked toward them, they talked about a game they had played together for years called Beat the Streak, from the Major League Baseball Website.
Erin told Pete that a mutual friend of theirs named Kane told her he'd played in fifty Beat the Streak leagues the season before when he was in Europe.
This seemed odd to Rock, since he had not once heard Kane mention anything about playing the game.

Zach's chopper

This was Rock's first time in a helicopter. It was owned and flown by Zach, a friend from the Hash House Harriers who invited him along as he flew a reporter from the paper to watch a devastating train wreck in eastern Arkansas.
It wasn't clear to Rock how anyone knew ahead of time of the wreck, but they arrived in time to see the train rolling just a few seconds away from it not far from DeValls Bluff.
The train at first smashed into an old, weathered barn, which immediately disintegrated into a swirl of hay and shattered boards. The train entered a small town and smashed building after building until it rolled into the Arkansas River and sunk to the bottom.
Zach dropped the reporter off, who began to help pull people from the river, except for a few children who seemed pleased by their circumstance. Some of them swam away from the shore and began to play in the water, as if the train had delivered them there for that purpose.
Zach turned the helicopter back home, cruising right down the middle of a long, straight highway between telephone poles on each side.
"Aren't you flying too close to those poles?" Rock asked.
"You want to get as close as you can," Zach said.

Back yard drive

At first Rock thought he had hit his drive too high. It seemed to have started with the trajectory of a wedge rather than the 10.5-degree, 2008 Taylormade driver he hit from his cousin Crutch Aikman's back yard. Nevertheless, after it reached the apex of its ascent and began to turn back down, it was clear that it had enormous carry. It landed in someone's front lawn on the other side of city park, or at least Rock thought so. He wasn't positive. Pretty sure, but not positive.
Rock could only estimate how far it had gone, but it looked like 300 yards or so. Crutch walked out a few seconds after it landed.
"Goddamn, Crutch, you should've seen the drive I just hit," Rock said.
"Where did it go?"
"You know what, I'm not certain, but I think it landed in the back yard of that red-brick house over there on the other side of the park?"
"Fuck, you're kidding me. Did it bounce off the street or something?"

Pro Bowl confusion

Apparently Rock had spent the night trying to appoint NFL players to the Pro Bowl but was confused throughout the process.
And there was even more involved.
He climbed from his front bedroom bed shortly after dawn and heard, as he used the bathroom, an old, retired linebacker named Harry Carson, the Pro Football Hall of Famer and former Giant, complain that a story Rock had written said Carson played in the 1960 Pro Bowl. Carson's first season in the pros was 1976.
Rock put his hands up, walked back to his bedroom and told Carson not to worry, he'd fix things but not until after he got these fucking Pro Bowl rosters settled, the ones he was working on right now. Carson held up a sweatshirt with his name and number and 1960 printed across its front. "We'll take of take care of that, man." Rock was frustrated and still baffled. "Just be patient. I'm telling you, right now I got other things to do."

The championship tent

A small-town high school in Texas so frequently won state championships that its leaders felt compelled to construct a permanent, yet easily storable tent in which students, alumni, and townspeople could gather to celebrate.
Rock was on hand shortly after the school won its classification's 2014 football championship. He stood downhill from the gym and watched as several men and boys dragged out an inflated, olive drab bundle of canvas and rubbery plastic roughly the size of an average mobile home. Rock and another hundred people saw the workers push it down the hill toward them. It bounced like a beachball perhaps a hundred yards before it shuddered to a stop on level ground near Rock. The men and boys walked or jogged down the hill to the large contraption and began to unsnap and untie its bindings.
With one final tug a large tent unfolded, filled with everything anyone would need for a celebration. It contained dozens of long wooden picnic tables, seating for several hundred, and pantries and walk-in refrigerators and freezers stuffed with food and beverages in a huge kitchen that included enough stoves and burners to cook for anyone who came.

Gambling service

Rock struggled with all the data involved as he tried to establish point spreads and bracket predictions for the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. He wandered from his back bedroom to the bathroom, where he lost his balance and fell forehead first across the rim of his bathtub.
He noticed blood as it splashed across the tile, but his mind was still on his betting service. Even as he looked in the mirror to see rivers of red rolling down his face, Rock thought in terms of percentages and accuracy. It occurred to him that his predictions had been correct eight-six percent of the time. In fact, his mind—a moment before he recaptured it—repeated "eighty-six percent" again and again.

Something's wrong

Something was severely wrong, but Rock couldn't figure it out. Apparently he had broken a rule, or rules, perhaps even a law or laws. He didn't know.
Up from an afternoon nap, he sorted through his mail and wondered what to do with his property tax bills and a check from the paper which he mistook for a bill. Or was it a fine? Rock sat on his couch and ate three Hershey's Kisses.

Car trouble

This wasn't good. Rock's 1994 Toyota Camry was parked in a lot across from the Hot Springs Convention Center. It ordinarily looked bad, with numerous small dents and scratches and faded maroon paint and an interior marred with stains from a thousand spills and litter from a hundred sources.
But from across the lot as Rock approached from a basketball game he had just covered for the paper, he could see that someone or something had peeled up the side edges of the hood so that it had a concave appearance. As he neared he noticed the engine was exposed, and though Rock was no mechanic, he did know enough to know that a lot of wires were missing.