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Rock woke up on Saturday morning to discover that his unpublished novel, A Different Closet, was posted on the Internet and that nearly everyone was talking about it.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.' "