A chance to win

The Little Rock Marathon was in shambles. Almost without exception, entrants' race numbers were registered in other people's names, and the course was so poorly marked that runners were spread all across downtown.
Fortunately for Rock, he knew every turn of the new route. He was running very well and thought the disorganization might work to his advantage. He had a chance to win.

A living

It was a nice way to make a living, but it confused Rock at times. For instance, he wasn't sure what tracks raced on Monday nights. He couldn't find the past performances anywhere, but he soon realized it didn't make any difference. Golden Gate Fields was the only American track still racing and it was a minute from the ninth and final race.

A declarative statement

One of the students in an English literature class offered the teacher a breakdown of a thoroughbred race on Turfway Paradise's Monday card as her example of a declarative statement. It seemed to Rock that the teacher, Ms. Fuller, was lost in some other matter and did not hear what the student had to say.
"Pardon me, Ms. Fuller, did you hear that?" he said.
Ms. Fuller did not respond. She rather kept her head down, apparently absorbed in whatever she had turned to in the book she held open. Several students laughed softly.
Rock tried again. "I beg your pardon, Ms. Fuller, did you hear what she had to say?"

Real time

He wasn't sure why, but Rock had been asked to reenact a great deal of his past. There was no way for him to know when he began, but he suspected he was getting close to the present. It was daylight in his back bedroom and, according to his watch, Monday morning.
Rock was in his kitchen, making coffee. He was nearly certain this was real time and not something he had lived through before.

No cheering

Stadium seating was set up in a bus station, and Rock and people scattered throughout the facility were watching a football game that involved the Washington Redskins. There was no doubt Rock wanted the Redskins to win, and he couldn't help but cheer out loud for them.
A woman seated near one of the many television sets tried to shush him, which seemed odd to Rock. He wondered why anyone would care one way or the other.
The Redskins scored, and Rock cheered once again. This time the woman seemed angered. "Shhhhh," she uttered as loudly as possible.
"Ma'am, I am not going to not cheer," Rock said, though somewhat weakly, as though he were losing his voice.
"Yes you are," she said.

Church group

The men in Rock's church congregation were in a habit of gathering in line near his bathroom to await results of some sort. It wasn't clear what, at least not to Rock, but he had grown somewhat self-conscious with these strangers in his house on Sunday mornings.
He decided they might be interested in a long-drive competition, only not today. It was raining outside, and Pam wanted in.

Practice cats

A high school football coach somewhere in the Little Rock metropolitan area had worked out a way to use house cats in his practices, and Rock and an old friend named Rex Nelson showed up to see how.
It was overcast and bitterly cold out, so the practice had been moved inside the school's gymnasium. Rock and Rex walked in through a crowd of football players and worked their way to the back of the gym where a table was set up for the press.
Two units of players worked through drills in front of them. As they did, at least a dozen cats sat behind the players on a row of old wooden school chairs. They seemed uncommonly patient for cats, yet eager to participate.

Team captain

As this experience unfolded, it seemed unimaginable to Rock that anyone would choose to become the captain of the Arkansas Razorbacks and Lady Razorbacks track and cross country teams. Nevertheless, he was it.
Practice was over for the day, and Rock was required to direct an apparently daily ritual that involved running miles of laps from the UA campus to downtown Fayetteville and back. This potentially endless process included a progressive state of undress for Rock. He wondered why he had never heard of such an insane tradition, apparently put in place by legendary but long-since retired Arkansas track coach John McDonnell.
All at once, late in the afternoon, Rock was at his house in Levy, and the sun was coming up. He ate a PayDay bar, established it was Friday morning, and then went back to bed.

About to be shot

Cars and pickup trucks were backed up for the new car wash just opened off Camp Robinson Drive near the southern edge of Levy. Rock took his place behind several vehicles in a driveway to wait to enter a bay door that led into the two-story prefab metal building and its ramp to the second-floor washrooms.
The driveway wasn't quite wide enough to accommodate more than one lane of traffic. Consequently, anyone who wanted to drive past the bay door to the parking lot had to wait for cars in line. Rock was unaware of this until a car pulled in directly behind his old Ford. Within a few seconds, he heard the driver shout, "You better get the fuck out of my way."
Rock was startled, and then frightened when he felt something hard pressed against his head. He turned to see the barrel of a gun held by a very large Arkansas State Trooper, whose face was reddened and creviced with anger. Rock knew he was about to be shot.

The rock wall

A wall of artificial stones gave Rock a scenic option for his descent from school to his apartment. Most of the other university students who lived in the complex used it, though there was a less strenuous route along a sidewalk that went around the wall.

Rock had begun to descend it from school one day when he noticed a blonde-headed man climbing toward him. The man, dressed in dark clothing, scowled. His hands were tucked into the pockets of his black pea coat, and he stared at Rock as they approached each other. Rock was immediately wary. Whereas the wall offered relatively safe lanes, it was steep, with single switch-back trails that would make it easy for anyone to dislodge anyone else. He knew it would offer this man a simple opportunity to push him to serious injury and perhaps death if their paths crossed. He decided to turn back to walk around on the sidewalk.
He kept the man in sight, though, and watched him begin to pick up rocks the size of baseballs and throw them at other students near the top of the wall.

City fair

Small city fairs like this one had delighted  Rock throughout his lifetime. Exhibits, vendors, and carnival rides were placed around a small lake near downtown, and hundreds of people wandered around them through tall old oaks and evergreens.
He knew lots of people there—Little Roch Hashers, several classmates from high school and college, and a pretty young woman from the Arkansas Traveller 100-Miler, who worked a kiosk selling snowcones and fruit-flavored soft drinks. Rock thought she was beautiful, but he couldn't remember her name, and she showed no sign of recognition as he filled a large paper cup with red punch.

The man

This man in Rock's bedroom, with a nearly textbook homeless look, unkempt, unshaven, with wild hair and filthy, tattered clothing, held a wastepaper basket full of food refuge and old snuff residue, and he began to dump it on Rock's bed.
Rock didn't know who he was or why he was making this mess, but the man was clearly angered. It seemed obvious that he had come to pick a fight.
"What are you doing, man?" Rock said.
The man shoved Rock's chest. Rock reached up to separate his arms and push him away. The man then reached under the bed and grabbed a crystal dinner glass full of some sort of paper product, stained brown and powdery years earlier by tobacco spit.
"I've heard about you," the man said. "I've heard what your neighbors say."
"What the fuck are you talking about, man? You need to get the fuck out of my house."

Hardwood

Major work was underway in Rock's house. He walked into his vast living room to see that all of his furniture and the large rug were gone. There was sheet rock leaned against walls in the living room and kitchen. His mother Jane was in the kitchen, dressed in jeans and an old flannel shirt. She held a can of paint and a brush.
"We have a lot to do," she said.
"No kidding," Rock said. "I guess we should get to it."
He walked back into the living room and noticed that its hardwood floor was filthy and heavily scratched. On an area near the kitchen, it looked as if parts of it were stained with splotches of black tar or tree sap.
"Man, I wonder where this stuff came from," he said.
He knew it would be tough to scrub away, but his first job would require a broom and dustpan and a good deal of time. The floor was at least twenty-five hundred square feet.

The system

There was a system set into place in Rock's house that would ensure the disposal of large, unwanted items on the day city trucks came by to haul such things away. What's more, it became apparent at daybreak that the same system had also aided Rock's interaction with his offensive linemen during his years as a professional quarterback.
Rock remembered that he had invited several of the linemen over for lunch. Clearly, it was time to get up. He figured he would have to call out for pizza.

Toys for the office

It was apparent that someone had brought two high-tech looking toys, which Rock noticed as soon as he walked into the coaches' office.
"What the heck are these?" he said.
"They are dangerous toys is what they are," said a young, blonde-headed coach with undisguised contempt in his voice.
They were new to Rock. One was shaped like a spaceship, with yellow plastic gull wings two feet across and a red fuselage about three feet long. The other was a three-foot tall gray plastic robot with a flesh-tone head in a gray helmet.
It seemed each were designed to roll around the floor in pursuit of whoever happened to be up and moving about, which for the moment was Rock.
"Watch out," said one of the coaches, a light-skinned, likable African American with a tight, almost red afro. "Those things will start firing on you, and it kind of hurts."
Another coach stood to demonstrate. He cut between Rock and the approaching robot, which drew a plastic ray gun from what looked like a cell-phone holster around its waist. It pointed the gun at the coach and fired a ray of tiny sparks into his midsection.
"How much does that hurt?" Rock said.
"Just a little," the coach said. "It just feels like a very mild shock."
The spaceship turned toward the black coach after he stood from his desk and walked into a small snack room that connected the assistants' office with  the head coach's. The robot joined the ship and rolled toward the coach, who stood between two small tables, a handful of chairs, and two rows of vending machines.
A coach seated at his desk laughed. "I'll tell you what, Rock, you really don't want them to team up on you."

Practice

Rock and another coach tried to direct a football practice, but chaos began to take control as the drills grew more detailed. The final straw came with a particularly complex play that had everyone running in seemingly endless circles around the large rug in Rock's back bedroom.
It wasn't long before he began to question whether or not this mess was a football practice at all. Nothing about it made much sense.
He was prone on the rug and clearly unbalanced. His right hand seemed injured. At any rate, he knew it hurt like hell.

Cold Dr. Pepper

They were in a shady spot on the west side of the backstretch of Oaklawn Park's racetrack, on a hill perhaps twenty feet off the track. Rock had never noticed it before. Greta, a 25-year-old retired jockey Rock had somewhat adored for years, sat beside two fifty-year-old female riders and a small, frail, deeply wrinkled old man. They each held bottles of soft drinks, beaded with water, apparently drawn from a nearby wooden trough filled with ice and dozens of bottles of Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper.
As Rock walked toward them, Greta glanced his way, but her expression displayed nothing, a reaction that in no way surprised him.
"Hi y'all," Rock said. "Greta, is there any chance I could take one of those Cokes?"
"They're for the workers," she said.
It was exactly the response Rock expected, but after a pause of a few seconds, Greta stood and walked toward the drinks. As she reached into the slush, she said, "What do you want?"
"Oh, thanks. How 'bout a Dr. Pepper."
Greta handed a bottle to the man, who opened it with an old, rusty church-key opener. Rock took it from him and thought it tasted better than anything he had ever drunk.
"Wow," he said. "I didn't realize how thirsty I was."
As he drank, Rock watched Greta mount her horse and ride away.

A recruiting visit

There were three high school basketball players, boys all, who had worked throughout their senior seasons toward college scholarship offers, each aided along the way by Rock and his friend B.J. and an elderly woman who seemed to have a romantic inclination toward the least talented of the three.
Each of the players hoped to attend three different schools at the same time, including Arkansas State University. Rock, B.J., and the woman agreed to pool funds to cover whatever the scholarships failed to cover.
The boy who the woman seemed interested in had been offered full rides to all but Arkansas State, and Rock was in Jonesboro to watch his recruiting visit.
Arkansas State was in a game, playing before a large crowd when the boy walked into the gym dressed as though he were a character from an old Tarzan movie. He wore a tan loincloth of black-spotted animal fur and nothing more. He was barefooted, and when people in the grandstands saw him enter, they erupted in loud cheer.
It was clear to Rock and B.J. that the fans knew of this player, and they figured this had to help his and their cause.

Roll

A judge in Houston, Texas, decided to start ticketing every fiftieth driver who rolled through a stop sign near the museum district and Memorial Park Golf Course. He set up his court near the sign and watched with several city employees and jurors as policemen rushed into place to pull over drivers who failed to fully stop.
The fiftieth was a middle-aged woman in a late-model luxury car, and she at first seemed confused. But after the judge told her that the fine was only five dollars, Rock could see relief roll across her.

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton was at their grandmother's house in Nashville when Rock and Jim arrived, but it didn't seem odd to either to see a former U.S. president standing in the front yard.
Rock spoke to him using his best Clinton impersonation, a sort of raspy, southern-twinged draw that had become one of Clinton's prominent trademarks.
Clinton looked displeased. "You know, I get tired of people doing that," he said. "I hear it all the time, everywhere I go.  I suppose next you're gonna say, 'I feel your pain.' "

Rock's 100

The start and finish of Rock's out-and-back 100-mile course were in his back bedroom. Most of the course was set in a confusing array of flour and toilet paper that was difficult for Rock to explain to several ultra-runners gathered in his living room.
They gave him a hard time about it as they joined him to scout the first mile. The first thirty feet or so were through his house, then it was out his front door to Orange Street. After a block, runners would meet the trail, which was indistinguishable from much of the Arkansas Traveller course.
One of the women mentioned how comfortable his house would feel after a 100-mile trail race. It was cold outside.

Two-year-old pilots

Results of something rolled across his spiral notebook, and Rock read them as he lay in bed. They were confusing, but his first notion was that they represented some sort of bizarre report concerning test flights taken by prospective two-year-old airline pilots.
He realized after a moment that there was no denying what he read, and it was clear that all of the pilots had received superior marks, but he couldn't help but wonder what airline would hire near-infants to fly its planes. He imagined the sight of two-year-old children dressed in captain's uniforms and the reaction of passengers as they watched them walk aboard. This couldn't be right.
Short notes by each test flight indicated the pilots' readiness. One read, "Can't fail." Another: "Appeared eager to race."
Of course. That must be it. Rock's confusion began to clear, or at least he hoped. Surely he was reading reports on two-year-old thoroughbreds, not pilots. That must be it.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump called Rock early on a Thursday morning, well before daybreak, to ask if he would guide him on a tour of Levy. He said he spoke to editors at the newspaper. "They recommended you," he said.
Rock agreed, but when he woke up at sunrise remembered he had already planned a trip to see his mother in Nashville. He knew his oversight could mean trouble, so was consequently relieved when the sugar from a Halloween-size PayDay bar at last kicked in.

The Moody Blues

Rock joined friends Joe and Sonny at a bar on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. When he arrived, there was a band playing from a stage in an adjacent room. Their song ended, and Joe turned to Rock. "All right, man, it's your turn," he said.
"Do what?"
"We're playing a game, Rock," Sonny explained. "The whole bar is. When it's your turn, which it is right now, you read the name of the band on the album cover right there in front of you, and if that band happens to be here, they'll play whatever song you want."
Rock just then noticed a tattered 1960s Moody Blues album cover between his arms on the table. People Rock's age commonly kept records like this packed away by the hundreds in attics and garages all around the civilized world.
"Just announce to the bar something like, 'Are the Moody Blues here?' " Sonny said. "And don't be embarrassed. Everyone in here's been doing it all night."
"OK," Rock said, and then loudly. "Are the Moody Blues here?"
He was confident they would be, but he heard no immediate response and was disappointed after a walk through the two rooms and a glance at the stage revealed they weren't.

Too much to ask

An old acquaintance of his named Hugh asked Rock if he would help pace him through a 1000-meter indoor track race. Although perfectly untrained, Rock said he would, and then spent the rest of the day wondering whether he was at all capable.
Hugh, a seventy-year-old former age-group running star, needed to complete the race in 3 minutes, 48 seconds or less in order to qualify for an unspecified championship event. Rock later ran the numbers and became nearly certain he couldn't help beyond perhaps half the distance, particularly after he calculated that a 3:48 would require him to run at exactly a 38-minute 10K pace.
Rock stepped onto a 160-yard indoor track in an old abandoned warehouse to test his legs, and he wasn't at all surprised by their deadness. He was, however, a bit disappointed to find that not only was he incapable of completing 1000 meters at the pace Hugh needed but that he furthermore could not run the required speed at all, not even for a few steps.

God's Record Book

A group of runners and volunteers from the Arkansas Traveller 100-Miler were gathered in a dark, dingy motel room. Rock and fellow Little Rock Hasher Tiny Tim Biggs were among them.
Rock and Tim stood near the door, away from the others. "I wonder what the farthest is anyone has ever run non-stop," Rock said.
"Do what?" Tim said.
"You know. How far has anyone ever run without fucking stopping?"
"I don't have any idea."
"This is why we need God's Record Book."
Several bystanders were suddenly nearby and looked at Rock as if he were insane.
"What are you talking about?" Tim said.
Rock explained that if there was some omnipotent entity, surely he could put together and publish a list of every single record, including the furthest anyone had ever run without stopping.
Tim mentioned that at least three Traveller winners said they ran every step of the course.
"Sure," Rock responded. "But you know they stopped at least for a moment at a few aid stations. For one thing, they have to get weighed a few times."

A few questions

There wasn't much to ask. Rock already had most of what he would need to put together a notes package on the University of Central Arkansas football program, but he was in a cloakroom when the head coach walked in.
Rock decided to ask a few questions about the previous Saturday's game that he knew nothing about.
"Coach, what are your thoughts about the game?" he said.
"Well, you know, obviously we were disappointed, but we gave it our best," the coach said. He spoke softly and looked somewhat angered.
It occurred to Rock moments later that the team was on a bye week and hadn't played. He didn't know what to think.

A paleo diet

Due to some undefined disaster, Rock and everyone he knew were limited to a paleo diet, which for him and other Type I diabetics was an extremely tricky proposition.
Rock was limited by hypoglycemia as he examined fecal matter, but he was nevertheless surprised to see that much of it was shaped like things his associates had consumed. Some of it, for instance, looked very similar to rainbow trout or sardines, except it was translucent and light gray.

Samantha's return

It was the first time Rock had ever put his cats Pam and Jo on leashes, but they seemed to like it as he walked them through the parking lot of a grocery store on the eastern edge of North Little Rock. And they seemed particularly happy when an elderly woman introduced them to two large, fuzzy black dogs.
As the dogs and cats meshed in a big ball of fur, another cat made a sudden appearance from under a car. It was Samantha. Rock recognized her immediately.
Samantha lived with Rock and the other cats for ten years, but he thought she had been killed by the city's animal control more than six months earlier. Nevertheless, here she was, and he was elated.

NASCAR, one-on-one

He was no more than a moderate NASCAR fan, but Rock won tickets to a race in Little Rock and was excited to go.
It was scheduled for a strip mall's former anchor store, roughly the size of a typical Walmart Super Center, and was apparently set up for a series of one-on-one races in which racers faced several complicated maneuvers. This became evident to Rock as he watched a car get wedged between a banister and a wall. The driver stepped out, cursed his mistake, and lifted the car by its trunk so he could reposition it to clear the opening.

The new course

Most seemed delighted by the new Little Rock Marathon course Rock had designed and set, but after no more than a few days, he could no longer remember its details. There were things about it that made no sense to him.
There apparently was a divide shortly after the start that separated elite racers from the bulk of the field. No one could explain where it was to Rock, and he had forgotten. He and a man he had known for years but whose name he'd never learned jogged across a bridge near downtown. They looked for the spot where the field would split, but it was late at night, and Rock knew they would never find it.

A baseball game

A group of Major League baseball players were in an old snack bar in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, a town of about a thousand people in rural southwest Arkansas, and one of them introduced Rock to a baseball game in the bar's game room.
It appeared to Rock as a hybrid between baseball and a video game. A real batter would face a real pitcher, separated by about five feet, and attempt to hit the ball against a wall a foot or so behind.
Rock assumed hits were judged by their velocity and where they hit the wall, but after several games he noticed that all of the other batters were running to bases designated by red lights on the wall. There were defensive players spread about the small space, fielding hits and rushing toward the lights.
"I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure that out," Rock told his old friend Walt in an attempt to explain his terrible batting average.
Rock said he thought the game would work similar to an old one he had played in the same bar as a sixth-grader back in 1971. He remembered the machine as the first electronic game he had played. It was built like a pinball machine, with a small brown bat in place of paddles and a shiny, silver pinball that would roll down a ramp from a pitchers mound.

An eternity for Rock

Here's the way Rock's new world was rigged, and it seemed as if there was nothing he could do about it. As he searched throughout his house for his glasses, he wondered if this was a new eternity for him.
Someone had started a loop in which Ricky and Lucy Ricardo would repeat their dialogue from I Love Lucy without change. For instance, Ricky would say, "What time is it?," and Lucy would respond, "It's 5:30 a.m.," and that is where time would stop.
Rock thought he might have to accept this, but just before he climbed back into his back bedroom bed, he recognized the symptoms of hypoglycemia. He ate a tube of Gu and a small disc of peppermint candy from his bathroom and said to himself, out loud, "C'mon, man. Let logic take over."
Within five minutes, he knew it was a little before six a.m., Tuesday. His glasses were under the maroon chair in his living room, and he was not obliged to do anything for anyone until Wednesday. He turned off his television and called up Rock dreams from the Internet.

A panicked whisper

This was only the second coral snake Rock had seen and the first time one had threatened him. It was near the back screen door to Rock's brother's house and was clearly aggressive. Rock climbed the screen to get away.
His concern returned when his cat Jo approached. She wanted in and was oblivious to the snake, among the deadliest of its species in the New World. As Rock clung to the door, he tried to yell for his brother Jim and Jim's wife Karen, both of whom he could see in their kitchen no more than ten feet away. The problem was that he had lost his voice. He tried to scream but could manage no more than a panicked whisper. "Jim, Karen, help."
At last Jim looked his way and immediately rushed to help.

The fate of humanity

Rock hadn't played jacks in years, yet some parental-like figure assigned him a game upon which the fate of humanity relied. It was a ridiculous circumstance, acknowledged not only by Rock but by several other adults in the room.
The entire universe was represented by a blonde woman on his television. Rock was baffled and couldn't find his pants. All he knew for certain was that his cats Jo and Pam wanted out.

A round of golf

They would have to play through mud, no doubt. It rained all day the day before. Rock's cousin Crutch was in town and didn't have anything he needed for a round of golf, but it didn't matter. Rock had a large closet stuffed full of equipment, including a set of clubs, a bag, and a pull-cart an ex-girlfriend left there years earlier.
Crutch seemed particularly interested in a twenty-five-year-old pair of golf shoes, white Nikes with outdated metal spikes. "Do you think these would be good on a day like today?" he asked.
"Sure, they'd be ideal with all the muck we're about to play through," Rock said.

A large puppy and two cats

A reporter was at Rock's house to ask him about his adopted pets. He got new ones almost every day but decided to settle for a while on a large puppy someone had brought him from out of the wild and two cats he found in his neighborhood.
No one seemed to know what the dog was, but it looked almost like a wolf. Rock didn't care one way or the other, so long as it didn't harm the cats.
The reporter was a surprise, and Rock wasn't sure what to do. He got up from his back bedroom bed to look for dog food. There wasn't any, of course. He knew that. He mixed two bags of cat food and hoped the puppy wouldn't know the difference.
On the other hand, Rock didn't even know where it was. He figured it must be outside somewhere, so he cracked open the front door and screen just enough to let each of his pets wander in and out.
The cats looked at him quizzically. So did Tom, his next-door neighbor. Rock couldn't remember ever having left his door and screen open.

Out of fashion

It was a low-slung Chrysler from the early 1960s, one of the first sports cars produced by any of the Detroit car companies, and Rock bought it for a song. He showed it to Jake Sandlin, a longtime cohort at the paper, in the old Arkansas Gazette parking lot in downtown Little Rock.
Rock was crazy about the car, but there was something funny going on with the ignition key. It had a wad of greasy crud stuck in the cuts that he couldn't quite wipe away. He tried to pinch it out with a handkerchief between his fingertips but to no avail.
As Rock struggled with the mess, Jake pointed out to him that the car's headlights were sealed shut by covers once popular among sports-car enthusiasts. They went out of fashion after no more than a few years because of their lack of reliability.
"Oh, shoot, I didn't notice it had those," Rock said. "Damn. They'll break within a week."

The company store

Everyone else left, disappointed to find that the ramshackle company store was out of food. There was no obvious reason Rock should have held out hope, but he did. He was very hungry, and there was something about the warm expression of the pretty, young African-American clerk that made him nearly expect her to have something for him.
As he stood under the thatched roof, between the room's walls of warped, charcoal boards, she turned toward him after the last of the rest were gone. "Here, I have these," she said. There was a bag of Cheetos in her hand. "And this cheeseburger."
He couldn't believe his fortune. The burger was wrapped in soft aluminum-coated paper, and when she handed it to him, Rock could feel its warmth through the thin casing. He imagined beef and melted cheese and a fresh, moist bun. God, he was hungry.

Island green

There was a new first hole at Rebsamen Park Golf Course, and it was impossible. Rock saw it for the first time with his former golfing partner Erin, a friend from Texas he had played with regularly ten years earlier. She was in town with her husband Chris, who hadn't yet arrived at the tee box.
The tee was enclosed except for a ten-by-thirty-foot opening, through which Rock could see the island green, five hundred yards away, further than he or almost anyone could or ever had hit a golf ball. The former fairway was under several feet of river water from tee box to green.
He pulled out a five-iron, which he proceeded to severely slice. His shot nearly hit an island a hundred fifty yards away before it splashed just in front, but Rock's second attempt took off like something from a dream, like no shot he or anyone else had ever hit. For a moment he thought it might actually reach the green. It fell a handful of yards short but was nevertheless an incredible, unprecedented effort.
Rock was disappointed when he looked to see that Erin missed it. Chris arrived a moment earlier, and she had walked to an adjacent room to meet him.

Underpants reader

Rock was out for a hike with the Gimblets—the whole gang, like in the old days, with Susie and Jayme and Ron and Elaine, out on some dusty country roads way out of town. He wore a new pair of boxer shorts he bought the day before and an old t-shirt.
His shorts were decorated by row after row of tiny Krispy Kreme Donut delivery vans, white with green cabs and a red logos painted along the sides. Rock had walked ahead of his friends and noticed what looked like a meter of some sort stuck in the road near an old, narrow bridge. As he approached it, it began to read his shorts: "Krispy Kreme Donuts. White with green and red."
He turned to his partners behind. "Hey, y'all, check this out," Rock said. "This thing's reading my new boxers."

The end of the world

It seemed at first to Rock that only he was doomed. He was in his back bedroom, where he had slept through most of the night on his single bed, the same one his maternal great-grandmother used as a child nearly one-hundred and fifty years earlier. It did not occur to him that his blood glucose was low. All he knew for certain was that he was moments from death.
There were no hints of fright or despair or any need for either. This was his course, inevitable and completely out of his hands. Rock felt a need to share it and was suddenly aware of an audience and that the destructive force of his demise was on the move, headed easterly from the back of his house. He began to describe things that would go with him first, including books and their titles from a bookcase on the south side of the bedroom. There was a tube of energy gel about to disappear that he chose to eat rather than let go to waste.
With that, Rock realized the entire earth was about to meet its end. He walked into his den, where he suddenly knew that wasn't possible. His home planet was safe for at least the next few billion years. 

Jim's Diner

Several runners gathered at Rock's rental house—a very large and old, dilapidated, run-down mess on 35th Street in Levy. They planned to eat later at Jim's Diner, a place owned and run by Rock's former neighbor, Jim Taylor.
Jim was a hard-edged, bull-headed retired cop, and his restaurant was old-school in every way. "We serve American food," Jim liked to say. "If you want anything fancy, go somewhere else."
Rock told his friends about it, and they were delighted to see Jim's Diner was purely retro, like a restaurant straight out of the 1950s. Everyone loved the food, but there was trouble at the register.
Something was wrong with a receipt. The paper appeared to have jammed in a printer, and it was nearly illegible.
"What are your friends trying to pull here?" said Jim, clearly angered. "I don't like being fucked with, Rock. You should know that by now."

Now & Later

Rock was seated in the Arkansas State legislature, apparently as a representative or senator. He wasn't sure which, or for that matter, whether he was utterly out of place. He knew he was there for some sensitive debate and that emotions were delicately teetered.
Angry young men in dark suits sat all around him when two tattooed, heavily pierced teenage girls, dressed in ragged denim and faded, tattered rock-and-roll T-shirts, suddenly approached his pew from behind and dumped a large box of hard yellow candy onto an open seat beside his.
The candy was a classic—sour Now & Laters, marked new and lemon-flavored, in their typical flat, rectangular shape, like tiny translucent dominos.
A man seated in front of him turned to ask what they were.
"Believe it or not, it's candy," Rock said. "I mean, I thought those girls came in here to make some trouble, but, man, this stuff's great. They're lemon Now & Laters."
"I've never seen those," the man said. "Hand us a few, would you?"

Little Rock Fair

Here was a perfect example of why Rock was occasionally completely exasperated by his job.
All he had to do on this occasion was put together a box score for a basketball game just completed between high school girls from Little Rock Fair and Parkview. He was in a crowded gymnasium on the Fair campus. Apparently a tournament was underway.
No one had kept a game book, though a student assistant from Parkview recorded scoring summaries of his school's players. No one from Fair seemed to care, except its coach, who said she could give Rock her top two or three leading scorers.
He was seated with several others at a table in a large room behind the bleachers and could feel frustration begin to overwhelm him. "Listen," he said to the coach. "Couldn't you find a student willing to keep a book for you? I can't tell you how important it is to us to have someone keep a few simple numbers."
"I just don't know who could do that for us," the coach said.

In sync

Several years earlier, Rock had arranged a timeline between then and now, so that he would be able to drift back and forth at will, but something was wrong. The line was no longer in sync, and Rock couldn't tell if he were in the present or past.
Someone pointed out to him that there were overlapping factors at play, including an inexplicable connection to the PGA Championship. He was pleased to see that dates on his wrist watch and laptop computer coincided.

Insanity

This went way back. Perhaps decades earlier, Rock dreamed of a concept in which a theme repeated again and again might result in a fruition of that theme. The hope was that if someone wanted something to occur, all they had to do was repeat the theme indefinitely.
"Ultimate wisdom," was foremost among them. Others fell into the same category, and they continued for more than two hours as Tuesday afternoon dwindled to darkness.
Ultimately, as he remembered from before, Rock came to believe that it was a concept that could lead to nothing but insanity.

A pep rally

It was the middle of the summer, but Rock and his friend Tom were among a nighttime crowd outside of Hornets Gymnasium at Maumelle High School. Apparently a pep rally for the coming football season was about to start.
As they entered the dimly-lighted gym, Rock could tell it was packed. He saw quite a few coaches he recognized as veterans, men he had seen over the past thirty years in gyms and fields and stadiums across the state.
A student team manager, dressed in a Hornets letter jacket, greeted Rock and turned to point toward Tom, who had stepped away and was about to walk into the warm, dank night
"Would you please ask your friend to quit peeing outside?" the student said. "Our pay toilets only cost a dime."
Rock was embarrassed. "I'm sorry about that," he said. "Yes, I will."

Liveliness

There were at least twenty Hashers crammed into an apartment somewhere in west Little Rock. It was early evening, and they were about to leave for some sort of event.
Rock was a late arrival. He knew he had planned to go for a long run that night and was conscious of having forgotten it as he stepped from the apartment alone. He jogged up a steep road stretched between buildings in the complex and could feel the liveliness of his legs. He knew he was ready to run fast and a long way.

Ready to go

Rock's final NBA season was winding down. He stood in a hallway before a game at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, chatting with two other old veterans, and they laughed about their relative lack of fitness and their teams's lack of prowess.
One of the players asked Rock how many games he thought his team could win.
"We have an outside chance of twenty," he said. "I mean, we're bad, but we're not the Knicks. We can still run a few basic plays. We know what a pick-and-roll is."
It occurred to him that it was bizarre he had somehow lasted in the NBA this long. He almost used his age as an excuse for his diminished skills but stopped short. No one had ever played a significant professional sport past the age of fifty, other than the hockey player Gordie Howe. Surely no one knew Rock was fifty-seven. That alone would have made him famous. The thing is, he could still play a little. He was ready to go.

Everyone

Everyone in America was connected to a narrow electronic band, a quarter-inch wide strip of wire that pierced the ceilings of houses and apartments from coast to coast. Americans would plug the band into their phones once a day to confirm their financial status.
Rock could tell he knew this but had apparently forgotten the details. The band at first notice ran into his back bedroom. Awake at last, he had no idea where it was. How could he have forgotten something so clearly fundamental to contemporary human existence?

Something big

Desks that Rock remembered from the paper's newsroom were rearranged at the intersection of Capitol and Louisiana. Everything seemed in order, so he didn't consider asking anyone what they were doing in the middle of a downtown thoroughfare. Besides, he was too busy contemplating the importance of his role in the coming day's event. Something big was scheduled for later on, perhaps in the afternoon, and he would be responsible for it.
Rock was pretty sure he needed to pick up some of the crap in his living room. He noticed that his cats were at the front door, positioned as if they wanted out.

Golf lesson

Petey King had a bucket of balls ready for Rock's golf lesson. Rock saw him waiting in the parking lot of the Country Club of Arkansas as he drove into the lot. He then suddenly realized he had left his clubs at home.
"Don't worry about it, Rock," Petey said. "Just go into the clubhouse and get 'em to give you a nine-iron and a driver."
A woman at the counter handed Rock two clubs made out of something similar to styrofoam. Their shafts were roughly six inches in diameter, and they couldn't have weighed more than a few ounces.
"Take these back," Petey said. "They're children's clubs."

Which stage

Their seats seemed too far back. Several were available a few rows forward, but Rock wasn't sure which stage the comedians would use. There was another, much smaller one behind him, with heavy curtains drawn around it. "Are we looking the right way?" he asked his guest Kurt Wagner, a friend he had known since high school, forty years earlier.
"Hell, I don't know," Kurt said. "Your guess is as good as mine."
It was clear Kurt couldn't care less. He seemed much more enamored than Rock by the overweight, middle-aged African-American women who had managed to find seats on their row.

Slice the globe

It seemed to Rock like a great idea. He was at the NFL preseason meetings, seated with Pro Football Hall of Famers Terry Bradshaw and Dan Dierdorf in a nearby cafeteria. Before he sat, someone had handed him an odd, light brown globe, roughly the diameter of a cereal bowl. Its shell was made of compressed bran flakes, but it was otherwise hollow and filled with raisin bran.
The concept called for someone to slice the globe in half, thus forming two edible cereal bowls ready for milk and spoons. Rock explained that one of the cereal companies planned to introduce it at the Super Bowl. There was a shiny kitchen knife at the table, so he was able to present the former NFL stars with a demonstration.
"That is great!," Dierdorf said. "My grandkids are gonna love this."

Half price

He couldn't remember how the mini-mart operators had screwed him, but somehow the procedure they had in place made Rock feel obliged to pay twice as much as it was worth for a tank of gas. He was still steamed when he drove back through to top off his tank.
Jim Taylor, Rock's former neighbor, was the cashier. "They told me to give you your next fill-up for half price," he said.
Rock had only pumped a couple of gallons. The ticket was for $3.90, so he handed Jim a $1.95 in cash and a hand-written note. "Give this to them," he said.
The note read: "Thanks, dickheads."

A clear need for balance

The first tribute near the end of the movie was for the Union troops. There wasn't much to it, and it was immediately followed by a prolonged onslaught of soldiers dressed in gray. Someone sang Dixie as they marched from Rock's back bedroom bed and through a mangle of furniture and books and old clothes.
Rock thought there was a clear need for balance, but he wasn't sure where to look for it. People would complain. He knew that, and that he needed to go the bathroom, and that his foot still hurt.

Poker

The poker game had dwindled to four players, including Rock, a sports information director Rock had known for nearly thirty years, and some youngster whose juvenile behavior had everyone on edge.
The four agreed to play one more hand. Rock dealt each player five cards and was pleased to see he held two aces. That should be good enough, he thought.
But the young, cocky player had two threes and a joker. "Joker's wild, so that's three threes," he said.
"Bullshit," Rock said. "No one declared jokers were wild."
"I thought that was assumed," the kid said.

Coach Pat

There was a long way to go, but Arkansas-Little Rock's womens basketball team was off to a fantastic start against the top-ranked Tennessee Volunteers. Rock watched from reserve seats in Knoxville, where he sat next to Tennessee coach Pat Summit.
With ten minutes gone in the first half, Arkansas-Little Rock led by twenty points, and despite his proximity to Summit, Rock was rooting loudly.
Someone nearby turned to Summit and apologized for Rock's noisy celebration, but she shook her head and smiled. "He's behaving exactly as I would expect," Summit said. "He's doing what good fans do."

Rock was sold

Someone offered Rock free use of a downtown apartment. He had to ride in an elevator from the dimly-lighted, dank basement hallway of an office building near the Arkansas River to see it. A heavyset, African-American elevator operator told him this was the only way in or out.
The elevator opened into the living room-den of a large, beautifully furnished, high-rise apartment that overlooked the river and downtown North Little Rock. Rock was sold.

Chair to chair

The large group of volunteers that Rock had worked around for years at Arkansas-Little Rock Trojans basketball games had spent weeks devising a game they could play while the Trojans's game were underway.
It involved their moving from chair to chair around the perimeter of the court in a sort of race. Rock recommended to them that they keep score. He suggested they simply grant one point for each lap completed. They all agreed that the game should be limited to Arkansas-Little Rock home games.

He needed something to eat

At first Rock thought he had a choice. Of what it wasn't clear, but one of his options was to travel one-thousand years into the future. At least he thought it was an option. Before he had time to decide, he was in 3016.
He was pleased to find his house had survived, but it seemed nearly unbelievable that his television still worked. Howie Mandel was babbling on it about a group of teenage siblings having the goods to make it big or something. Rock had trouble standing. He knew he needed something to eat, but someone had pushed his couch back so far that it cut him off from the kitchen.

A bit of grandeur

Rock's father Richard accompanied him to his cousin Jill's funeral. They arrived a few minutes late and were consequently last in a line that extended far into the mezzanine of the large arena. At least hundreds of people were there, perhaps a thousand or more.
Rock knew how Richard's mind worked and had no doubt he relished their position. Entering the arena last, just before the service began, had the potential to add a bit of grandeur to his appearance. As for Rock, he hoped against hope more people would arrive.
Almost at the moment that thought formed, he saw a group of ten or more men walk into the lobby and toward them in line. They were in their twenties and thirties, each dressed in ill-fitting, ragtag suits, and even more wonderfully from Rock's perspective, each of them were carrying large cans or bottles of mini-mart beer, Miller and Budweiser and the like. To his delight, Rock knew immediately that a great story had brewed.

This so-called Dixie option

This was the first time Rock had been in the basement library of the Arkansas Gazette building in nearly twenty years, but it was perfectly unchanged. It remained dark, dank, and cool, with the same musty smell of old damp paper he remembered. He was there to find a story he had written about an Arkansas-Pine Bluff football game in the fall of 1990.
Within minutes, with story in hand, Rock was back in his blue bedroom, which had much the same feel as the basement library. Cool wind blew in from his rain-drenched backyard, and his cat Jo watched on quizzically as Rock spoke with a seventy-year-old African American copy editor named Wade, a cohort of his at the Gazette all those many years ago.
Wade explained how the Gazette had maintained what he called a "Dixie Option" on all of its copy from the Civil Rights era forward. He demonstrated: "We never used it, but it went like this," he said. Wade then punched up two copies of Rock's story. The first was as Rock had written it, but the second was changed so that its subjects appeared Caucasian, so that Arkansas-Pine Bluff no longer appeared as the historically black college it was.
Rock was fearful for several minutes, even after he had proceeded to his kitchen to turn down a fan, that this so-called Dixie option would be exposed, and with his name on the copy. He thought surely men at the presses must have seen the result of Wade's expose. He knew that in today's age of hypersensitivity, even to misdeeds from long ago, this could turn disastrous.

Without a word of warning

It seemed as though no one else noticed the policeman walk in, but Rock, from his desk in the newsroom, watched as he entered through the front door. He was short and stocky, with dark hair and a bushy mustache, and dressed in a standard navy-blue cop outfit.
The cop walked to Rock's desk, drew his pistol and looked over the side of an adjacent cubical. He took aim at someone or something Rock couldn't see, hesitated for a second, and without a word or warning fired two shots. He then held the gun at his side as he whispered something into a radio. Rock was frightened, but he noticed that the woman seated beside him had continued a phone interview throughout the incident without so much as a glance away from her desk, and it seemed as if her take was typical of everyone else's in the office.

A funny question

Rock met her at the Hash. She was tall, blonde, breathtakingly cute, perhaps thirty years old, and asked if he would let her take him to the restaurant several Hashers had selected for their post-run gathering, which seemed like a funny question to him. He laughed as he told her that he would indeed let her, though he understood grief from his Hashing friends was on the way.
She was curious about the tabloid Rock held.
"It's a racing form," he explained. "I'm going to the horse races this afternoon."
"Are you kidding me? Is there a racetrack around here?" she said. Rock thought she sounded genuinely astonished, and delighted. "I absolutely love horses."

A long advertisement

Rock's new world was nothing more than a long advertisement for his MacBook Pro. He awoke late at night and was influenced enough by it that he walked into his living room and opened his computer. All it showed him were video after video of enormous indoor spaces in various shopping malls, airports, and hotel lobbies, as if they would demonstrate his laptop's power and clarity.
The rooms were empty of people, but he found that he could call up individuals to see how they fit in. The first man walked around aimlessly for a minute or two before he stopped to complain. "You know what, this is really boring," he said. "Could you take me out of this?"
Finally Rock was able to call up his own house, and was very grateful to find he could eat out of the refrigerator. He wondered if he could simply drop into the video and eat free food for life.

A long pedestrian bridge

Rock's legs felt as lively as ever, but he was a little bit lost. He thought a left turn would get him back to I-30 and that from there he could return downtown along familiar access roads, but within minutes he was in sight of the interstate and could see there was too much traffic for anyone on foot, so he made a u-turn and found himself at the base of a long pedestrian bridge.
As he made his way above the traffic, he noticed a large young woman dressed in a knee-length mustard yellow skirt and matching sleeveless blouse. When he tried to run past her, she grabbed his left arm with such force that he had no choice but to stop. He noticed her face was coated with heavy rouge and mascara.
"Are you ready for some fun?" she said.
He felt a surge of panic. The woman was overwhelmingly large and powerful, and there was no apparent escape route from this narrow, dimly-lighted underground tunnel.

The Packers-Bears game

It was a little past 8 a.m. and Rock was still in bed. He could hear a crowd in his living room and knew they had come to watch the Packers-Bears game.
He got up and walked down to his basement where dozens of people, mostly Little Rock Hashers, stood in front of television mounted to a wall above them. Early in the first quarter, the Bears led, 7-3.

Insurance

There was no way Rock could leave his house before he paid for a relatively expensive insurance policy on his cats. It would cover the cost of any damage cats Pam or Jo might cause as they wandered around North Little Rock or through the neighboring woods of Pulaski County, and if he remembered correctly, it was going to set him back several hundred dollars. Rock needed to go to Hot Springs but couldn't until he sent in a check, and his problem, far beyond the cost, was that he couldn't find the bill.

Derby party

It was the first Kentucky Derby party Rock had ever attended, and he was impressed. There were hundreds of beautiful people there and a seemingly endless supply of food and booze, served by local college boys dressed in white formal wear. One had just offered him a submarine sandwich with a light, almost fluffy bun packed with all sorts of thinly-sliced beef and pork. Another followed with a bowl of oil and vinegar that had a slim glass straw leaned against its edge. Rock learned the idea was to use a thumb-assisted vacuum with the straw to distribute the dressing across his sandwich, which he thought was ingenuous.

By rule

The winner of the overall high school discus competition was one of two entrants—a boy from Russellville or Rock's friend Patre, a 43-year-old nurse from Little Rock.
Both had throws of exactly 170 feet and at first were declared co-champions, but that was before the Russellville coach protested. He claimed that his thrower should have won since his longest throw landed marginally further away than Patre's, or, to be exact, one-eighth of an inch.
By rule, according to event and meet directors, the championship was consequently declared vacant since the the final result was posted under protest.
"That's the rule," the event director said. "We can't change it now."

Dust-laden junk

Completely out of the blue, a friend of Rock's from the Hash named Skip stopped by his house for a visit. They met in his driveway, spoke for a moment about their relative indifference to the NFL draft, then walked through the kitchen to Rock's living room, which doubled as a bedroom.
Skip immediately knelt beside the bed and looked under it. Rock watched incredulously.
"Wow," Skip said. "It's a mess under here."
"Man, that's the first thing you do?" Rock said. "You go over to someone's house for the first time and look under their bed?"
Skip stood and turned toward Rock. "You know what, I'm not sure why I did that," he said. "I shouldn't have."
Despite the apology, Rock was embarrassed. He knew Skip had seen a gross accumulation of dust-laden junk.

The tree

Rock arrived home to find that the enormous old oak in his backyard had fallen and possibly damaged his and his neighbor Tom's houses. The bulk of the tree lay through the middle of Tom's backyard, but two large limbs leaned against their roofs. At first glance, the damage seemed limited to a few displaced shingles, so Rock wasn't terribly worried. It would take some manpower to move all the limbs and the trunk, but there were plenty of men around.
As he walked toward the side door of his house, he heard voices in his kitchen. He stepped in to find seven or eight workers amidst ruin. They had torn out cabinets and moved his refrigerator and oven to the middle of the room. Rock suddenly wondered if he had walked into someone else's house.

Parking arrangement

A long line of cars were parked parallel, side by side in pairs, and stretched for nearly a mile from the stadium, located in an oddly rural area on the outskirts of Little Rock. Rock was about to cover an Arkansas Razorback football game for the first time in fifteen years, and he didn't remember this parking arrangement.
He stepped from his car onto a grassy roadside as men directed cars to park behind his. Within a few steps, he met a young man he had known for years. Rock thought he remembered him from the Arkansas track team but later realized he was Justin Rose, the English golfer.

Tattoos

No one had ever noticed them before, but Rock removed his shirt near the end of a run with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers to expose a maze of tattoos on his back. They extended from his waist to shoulders and were primarily composed of small print and math equations.
A Hasher named Skip asked about them.
"They're hard to explain," Rock said. "I've had them for a long time, but I really don't know how long or what they mean. I wish I didn't have them. I know that."

Something more important

There was nearly a foot of snow on the ground, and it helped brighten the night as Rock drove through the southern edge of Levy. He passed an Arkansas State Police car that began to turn back toward him with blue lights flashing.
Rock immediately realized his headlights were off and began to look for a place to pull over, but cars were parked all along the street. He finally found a spot, but as he pulled in, the state trooper turned off the lights and turned away a block behind. Obviously something more important had come up.

As it were

Greg Norman reached into his bag for a driver, even though he and his playing partners, including Rock and Curtis Strange, were on a green and about to putt. As it were, drivers worked well enough since the hole was roughly as big around as a basketball.

First tee anxiety

It was time for Rock to tee off in the final round of the Masters, but the tee box was unfamiliar to him and his playing partner. Someone had put living room furniture on it. Chairs, a couch, an ottoman, and a coffee table were packed just behind the markers, making unimpeded full swings impossible.
A marshal suggested an option to Rock and his partner.
"You can take a drop in the drop area," he said. "It will cost you two strokes, but the next two holes are a short par-three and a short par-five. Most players birdie them both. Almost everyone has just taken a drop."
As Rock weighed the choices, he realized he had seventeen clubs in his bag. Somehow he managed to pull three out and toss them in his trunk without anyone noticing.

Sprinters

They were at a large social gathering of some sort. Rock wasn't sure exactly what it was, but it had the feel of summer camp. An old man had popped off all day about how fast he could run, and Rock and a teenage boy were about to race him. Rock couldn't wait.
It was finally time. Three sets  of blocks were set up on the edge of a field, but it was clear they had been poorly designed. The foot pads were inside metal wire cages, and it was difficult for Rock and his opponents to fit their legs inside the cage and even harder to get them out. When the command to start came, each of them struggled to free their legs. They all fell, and no race truly took place.
Rock had grown tired of hearing the man brag, and he insisted they hold their own race.
"Come on, man, let's race. I'll blow you away," he said.
The old man agreed, but as they walked away from the group, Rock noticed that he had wooden legs, with round wooden pegs for feet. They started jogging together but were soon running fast across hard-packed dirt. Rock felt great. It was apparent that the old man did, too, despite his lack of real legs. They were both perfectly content to run together, fast across the ground.

A turn missed

It would be hard to explain, but Rock had driven away from the airport in such a hurry that he missed a turn and drove straight from a dirt road into a field of tall grass. Luckily he stopped his car before it and he reached the Arkansas River, but the car was stuck in deep mud, and he would have to hike out.
He could hear a group of construction workers close by and was embarrassed to think they may have seen his error.
The field was flat as Rock had driven through it toward the river, but now he faced a steep ridge to descend. It was thick with trees, and he used them to maintain balance as he climbed down. A friend of his stood at the bottom and tried to help direct him.

The crash

A television monitor showed what looked like a dash-cam view from a nearby car driving along a highway close to Hot Springs.
Rock had just seen it on a screen in a room in the Oaklawn Park press box. He watched as an oncoming car pull from behind another into the driver's lane. The subsequent head-on collision was so sudden that Rock seemed to feel a jolt from it. The picture turned to a jumble of broken glass and bent and broken metal. It looked as though the car had turned upside down.

Badminton

Several Little Rock Hashers joined Rock in the living room or den of a large colonial house none of them were familiar with. They stood in front of a window that overlooked the backyard, and Rock overheard one of them, a man named Zack, say he had noticed the tattered remnants of a tennis court in the yard.
"It looked as if no one had used it in thirty or forty years," Zack said. "Maybe longer."They all looked for what Zack was talking about, until at last one of them pointed out an old, frazzled badminton net.
"Zack, that's a badminton court," Rock said.
Rock looked again and saw that the net was not in the middle of the yard but rather ran across the top of the window right in front of them.
"I guess the people who live here have to avoid the sun," Rock said. "Apparently they play in the den and their neighbors play in the backyard."

Pet snakes

An acquaintance from the Hash named Joe gave Rock a pet rattlesnake, but Rock lost it in short order. Apparently he had let it wander too far down a trail. Joe explained as they hiked in search for it. "Snakes aren't like dogs or cats," Joe said "They're not smart enough to remember where you live, or even that your house is a reliable source of food. That snake took off down this trail, and it won't turn back. He's just looking for food."
Joe turned off the trail onto a creek bed. Rock was far behind, and his attention was drawn to a strange orange creature in an eddy. It was the size of a plastic sandwich bag and shaped much the same, like a pillow. It's small head had almost mammalian features, with a well-defined mouth, nose, and eyes. It seemed wary of Rock, who began wonder if it might attack.
And then it did, and suddenly the shiny, slimy reptile clung to Rock's leg. Rock knew that he could easily knock it away but worried that it might be poisonous.

Ice cream

Rock walked into an ice cream parlor and immediately headed toward a large dispenser of soft-serve. After a few steps, he realized that he was behind a counter, in an area obviously reserved for employees. He turned back and saw that he and the owner—a thin, middle-aged balding man—were the only ones there.
"Sorry about that," Rock said. "I was acting like I work here."
"Would you like a job?" the owner said. "I could use some help."
Rock laughed. "There's no way I could work here. I'd gain a thousand pounds in the first week."
He ordered a sandwich composed of vanilla ice cream and bacon pressed between two waffles that was wonderfully delicious. It just needed a little more ice cream.

Scooter dream

Rock was a little drunk and riding a self-propelled electric scooter through a busy intersection somewhere in southwest Little Rock. There was a road crew there that included a friendly acquaintance of Rock's namee Steve, who had helped him with electrical matters in his house years earlier,
"Rock, how are you, man?" Steve said. "It's good to see you."
Each of the workers, including Steve, were sweaty and coated with dark grime from their work.
"I'm doing well, Steve. It's good to see you, too. I'd love to stop and chat for a while, but why in the fuck would I want to hang out with a bunch filthy, stinky men working on a fucking street crew?"
It was clear to Rock that Steve and his coworkers recognized that he had spoken in jest. They all laughed as he rode away on his scooter.
As Rock turned left at the following intersection, he saw a white state police car pull in behind him. He knew scooters weren't street legal and, no surprise, saw the car's blue lights come on. He wondered how the strong the smell of booze was on his breath.

Visitors

The house was a mess, not at all as Rock would have wanted it to look before two pretty, twenty-five-year-old women walked in, but here they were working their way past his roommate Jeff Lukas through the front door. One was dark skinned, of some indistinguishable ethnic origin, with curly hair and large, bright brown eyes, and the other blonde, sightly overweight, with a build that made him think she was a good athlete, perhaps a softball player.
They were both clearly excited by Rock's company and seemed indifferent to the mess, as though they were familiar with its type. They laughed as he continued around the living room, picking up the great collections of litter, primarily composed of newspapers and empty potato chip bags and soda-pop cans.

The big leagues

There was a strange, interactive major league baseball broadcast on Rock's laptop. It seemed as though it were some sort of loop designed to let everyone who watched it feel as if they were part of the game, actually at it and intertwined with the action and the broadcast.
After a while, though, it got too weird, and Rock was frightened, afraid he might not be able to escape the loop. It reached beyond Rock's house, at least into his neighborhood. He was afraid it might involve everything on earth and beyond and continue forever.

Tornado warning

A tornado warning for the Little Rock metro had been issued by the national weather service, but Rock could tell that the weatherman on television wasn't convinced that anyone was in any danger. It was bright and sunny out the day before, and the forecasts Rock had seen didn't say anything about bad weather on the way.
"I'm not sure what this is about, but apparently there is some severe weather activity at high altitudes somewhere in Pulaski County," the weatherman said. "A tornado warning has been issued, but I really don't think this is anything we really need to worry about."
Once up and in his den, it seemed odd to Rock that no one on Channel 4's early news program mentioned the tornado warning, but as dawn approached, he saw a blue sky on the horizon and sunlight begin to spill into his house. It was at last clear to him why he hadn't heard an air-raid siren.

Old friends

It was halftime of a basketball game, and as Rock returned to his seat from the concession stand, he bumped into a gray-haired African American man headed the other way. They briefly looked at each other and turned to continue their trips when it suddenly occurred to Rock that he knew the man. He was Kelvin Stewart, a former cross country teammate from high school. Rock hadn't seen him in nearly forty years and immediately turned back.
"Rock, how are you man?" Stewart said.
"Kelvin. Son of a bitch, it's good to see you."
They hugged each other and laughed out loud.

Eyes opened

Two sports information directors sat in the backseat of a van and Rock in the front passenger's seat as they rode from their hotel for dinner. The one who sat directly behind Rock reached up and attempted to put a blindfold around his eyes, but Rock would have none of it. He in fact snapped with anger.
"Don't do that," he said. "I will not have that done to me."
"Oh, OK," the SID said. "I didn't know."

Editor's choice

It was someone's responsibility to decide how to use a character from Rock's dream, and there were two choices. In one, the character played by Rock was shot in the head and died instantly. In the other, the same character took a shot to the body and survived long enough to make it to the kitchen refrigerator.
Both were set in the American west, midway through the second half of the nineteenth century.

Dead dog

One of Tom Z's three dogs had died, and when Rock arrived at a party in his backyard, he saw that Tom or someone had curled its body into a ball and put it beside a cooler near the middle of the gathering.
Tom's two remaining dogs played at the back border of the yard by a fence, but the dead dog looked bizarre, and Rock couldn't understand why Tom hadn't buried it or disposed of it in some other way. He knew it was just a matter of time before the carcass began to stink.

The car dealer

Immediately after Rock told the car salesman that he was interested in a recent model but only willing to spend fifteen- to twenty-thousand dollars, he noticed the man sigh.
"How soon do you want to get this deal done?" the salesman said.
"Today if possible," said Rock, who realized he had already forgotten what model he had asked for, and that he really didn't want to spend more than five- to ten-thousand. "But you know what, I think I'd be happy with another Camry. Heck, the last one I bought cost me thirty-seven hundred and I drove it for twelve years."
He wondered why he had come to a dealership in the first place.

The realtor

The realtor asked Rock to go back and check for dampness. "The woman really seems interested in this house," she said. "We have to make sure everything is perfect."
Rock flushed his commode and went back to his front bedroom bed, which he felt with his hands. It was dry but cold, certainly too cold to sleep in. He tossed a blanket and quilt on top of the bedspread and climbed in. It was still too cold. Oh well. With the realtor there, he really couldn't go back to sleep anyway. He seriously considered turning the heater back on.

Finals

There was no one else there when Rock showed up for his final in a communications class, so he sat alone on the steps in front of a modern brick classroom building on the eastern edge of the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville.
He knew he had screwed up. He had gone to one day of the class, months earlier, and remembered the professor emphasized the importance of one particular chapter in the textbook, but Rock had not once opened his book to that or any other chapter.
While waiting for other classmates and the professor, Rock in an instant realized he was midway through the final round of a golf tournament. His caddie told him that he led by one stroke. He faced an eight-inch putt for par but lost control of his putter and nudged the ball forward an inch. As he leaned his head back in frustration, his putter once again tapped the ball. A seemingly certain par was now a double bogey.
"Well, I guess we're going to need a couple of birdies," Rock said.
Many others had shown up for the test, and Rock was no longer interested in golf. Most of his fellow students were Little Rock Hashers. A sportswriter named Robert Yates was also there, and Rock overheard someone ask him what person at the paper covered Arkansas-Pine Bluff. "Oh, it's a guy named Frankie, but he doesn't do much," Yates said. "I heard someone complaining about that in Fort Smith this morning. I'm about to do a story on their football team."
As Robert spoke, a woman sat on the steps and began to urinate in a stream so strong it reached the building, twenty feet away.

Stake out

It was late at night and early in Rock's first shift on stake out for the Little Rock police department, and he sat in a large dark car in the parking lot of mini-mart near downtown. There was a thirty-pack of Bud Light in the passenger's seat, and he was going through it quickly.

Room search

The man at the hotel's front desk told Rock his room was on the twelfth floor, and that when he got off the elevator it would be about a seven-and-a-half minute walk away.
As he walked toward the elevator, Rock talked to a man in a dark business suit. "How could it possibly take seven and a half minutes to walk to my room? I mean, what, is the twelfth floor half a mile across?"

Drills

There were a large group of sportswriters and sports copy editors on a football practice field, performing somewhat complex drills that involved passing and catching. Rock hesitated before he finally joined them, and was surprised to find that he could keep up. His passes were weak and wobbly but generally on the mark, and he caught every ball thrown to him.
One thing he noticed was that he was the only one there not wearing a dark green baseball hat. Someone told him they cost eight dollars. An old friend and cohort from the paper named Steve Rogers told Rock he shouldn't waste his money, but someone else explained to him why they were such a good deal.
"Here's the thing," he said. "You pay eight dollars for the cap, but then if you show the beer vendors your receipt, they'll give you eight dollars worth of beer for free."

One Reese

Best Rock could tell it was slightly past 7 a.m., Sunday morning. It looked like dawn in his house. His cat Jo wanted out. Something was starting to register somewhere in his mind. He had eaten one Mounds bar. A Halloween-sized Mounds bar. Or maybe two. Yes, it looked like two. There were two empty Mounds wrappers on his bedroom floor.
He figured he was exactly one Reese's Cup away from glycemic equilibrium. That's all he needed, so the search began.
He was not desperate. His balance was intact and he was somewhat reasonable. He looked for the orange wrapper of a Reese anywhere he could remember having seen one: on his desk, his dressers, the kitchen table, the coffee table, the refrigerator, in several drawers, his bathroom closet, and, finally, his laptop computer bag. There was one there, he felt sure. At least one.
Jo stood by the front door and begged to go out. Rock remembered that his other cat Pam had been outside all night. He opened the front door. Pam came in. Jo left.
Back in the bag, he found the Reese, but when he opened it there was nothing inside but bone-dry chocolate and peanut butter crumbles and dust, which surprised him. But he was no longer worried. Years of experience told him everything was fine. The Mounds worked. Patience had won out, and it was time to make a pot of coffee.

Over at halftime

It was Rock's final game after a long, successful career as the Russellville High School football coach. Russellville was at Harrison and trailed by seven points at halftime, but everyone reacted as if the game were over. Rock and his players shook hands with Harrison's players and coaches, and Rock was suddenly home and in bed.
Without further thought, he got up and made himself a cup of green tea.
He debated whether to drive to Kroger to buy a can of coffee. No one seemed at all concerned that Rock and his team simply quit at halftime. That apparently was expected. At any rate, there was no going back. It was too odd to contemplate.

Thoroughbreds

They were friends of a friend who apparently lived in quarters along a row of large sheds built off of a highway just north of North Little Rock. They seemed like happy, contented men, with a few horses to help keep them company.
Rock noticed a leather saddle cloth on one of the horses branded with the word "Thoroughbred," and he asked about it. "He ran one race several years ago," one of the men said. "He didn't do very well and he's been here ever since."
Rock could see that a small horse lay on its side in the same stall, completely covered, head to tail, by an old wool blanket and another made of tanned leather. He wondered whether it were alive and removed the leather blanket to see it raise its head, exhale, and rise. It was a perfectly formed, yearling chestnut colt, absolutely beautiful, Rock thought. "Does anyone have any plans for this one?" Rock said.
The colt looked very fast.

A blowout

With a final score of 70-0, it was the most lopsided football game Rock had ever watched.
Someone asked him to report the score as 50-0 so as not to embarrass the losing team, but he decided not to write anything at all about it.

A new arm

The Russellville High football team hadn't had a top-notch quarterback in ten years, not since Eli Cranor. Since then, none had surpassed mediocrity, but Rock heard from retired track coach Don Carnahan that there was a Russellville junior high quarterback who had at times turned heads.
Rock and Carnahan met at a scrimmage and watched the young quarterback warm up. All of his passes looked crisp and on-target. "He has a nice arm," Rock said.
"Yes, he does," Carnahan said. "But wait until you see him in game action. He really struggles with consistency."
On the first play of the scrimmage, they watched him drop back and throw a ball that went nearly straight up, thirty yards or more. It fluttered and dropped into a mass of players perhaps five yards down field and was easily intercepted.

Sumo weight

When Karen Seagate was a photographer at the paper, she was slim and pretty, but Rock was assigned to cover a sumo wrestling tournament at Verizon Arena and saw a bizarre new version of her. She had gained at least two hundred pounds and was barely recognizable.
Rock saw his old friend Walt Webb at the tournament, and Karen was naturally the first topic of their talk.
"I can't believe it," Walt said. "And here's what I can't figure; did she gain all that weight to become a sumo wrestler...
"...or did she gain all the weight first?" Rock said.
"Exactly."
"That was my first thought."

Two twenty-seven

It had been more than thirty years since Rock received a speeding ticket, but he was pulled over for going thirty-seven in a thirty-five zone by a policeman parked in front of the Pike County Courthouse in Murfreesboro, Arkansas.
Rock parked in the town square beside a man who was pulled over just in front of him. He walked into the courtroom and approached a clerk.
"OK, let's see here," the clerk said. There were a stack of tickets at his desk. "Were you going thirty-seven or thirty-nine."
"Thirty-seven. I was going thirty-seven," Rock said.
"OK, then that'll be two twenty-seven."
"Two twenty-seven? Do you mean two-hundred and twenty-seven dollars?"
"Yes. How do you plan to pay?"
"How can it be that much? I was only two miles over the speed limit."
Other speeders were beginning to line up behind him.

Expressway

Cars had cut through these people's garage for years. It was built at a convenient crossroad in a ritzy neighborhood in Little Rock, and Rock had driven through it at least two or three times a year as long as he could remember.
The people who owned it understood its importance to local traffic patterns and had always left the two doors on each side of the garage open, but this day they didn't. The ones away from the street were closed and Rock had to stop near the house.
He got out of his car and a woman walked from the garage. She was about forty and dressed in a navy-blue business skirt with a matching blazer. "I'm sorry, but we had some work to do today," she said. "It's gonna be a few minutes before we can open the doors."
Cars had begun to back up behind Rock's.

Liquor

Several hundred people were gathered for a banquet along the bank of the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock. Rock knew many of them but was unsure why he or anyone else had come.
A tall, slim woman he guessed was in her mid-thirties, in a shiny blue dress, with shoulder-length brunette hair and sharp eye makeup approached him. "Hi there. I'm glad you've come. In case you haven't noticed, there are small bottles of wine and cordials on all of the tables. Please, take as many as you want as gifts for your mother."
Rock walked past several of the tables, which were spread randomly, twenty to thirty feet apart across the plush green grass, and retrieved several small, airline bottles of booze. None of the brands were even remotely familiar to him.

Limon First National

It had been five years since Rock last visited Limon, and Scott Vrable once again decided to show him around. As before, their first stop was the town's bank.
Rock remembered everyone from the time before, but he'd forgotten their names. After Scott walked him past the first line of employees, the boss and office personnel up front, Rock asked him to tell him the names of the people he was about to be reintroduced to.

Knives

Something woke Rock up. There was a commotion near the foot of his bed, and he turned to see two Hispanic men and a woman armed with knives just as they launched an attack on him. He knew he had little chance but grabbed a pillow and tried to fend off the slashes. A blade penetrated his lower right abdomen and he screamed, consumed by panic.
And then, just like that, they were gone. Rock's bedside lamp was on, and he could see he had not been stabbed. He lay frightened. It wasn't yet midnight, and he considered getting up to avoid further contact with the knife-wielders.

Kasey's mom

Kasey Hall's mother had blown up three ovens in the previous year and now owned a large copper one that ran on steam controlled by her landlord from an apartment above. "He doesn't trust me with it, and I can't say that I blame him," she said.
It was clear to Rock that Kasey was at least a little embarrassed.
"The fact is, Rock, mom hardly ever cooks," Kasey said.
"Yes, particularly now that I have this contraption. I still haven't figured out how to use it."

A football book

It looked like a good idea. Rock was in the mezzanine of Cowboys Stadium when he noticed a stack of books for sale at a kiosk near the door of a souvenir shop. With a quick glance, he could tell they were about the last weekend's Dallas Cowboys game. He opened one up to find its detailed description of the week of preparation. It was maybe a hundred pages, with lots of photographs.
"It was very well done," he told someone at a gathering that night. "It looked like it would be fairly easy to write. I'm considering something like it for the Razorbacks."

Money machine

Though they were in a multi-day ultra-distance race west of Little Rock, neither Rock nor the group with him questioned why they had set up camp in a parking lot between the Town and Country Shopping Center and a smaller strip mall near one of the city's busiest intersections.
They were across University Avenue from the campus of Arkansas-Little Rock, with miles of city streets and highways between them and the nearest trail.

Rock was there with about ten other people, including Keith Brown and Donna Falkenhain, a couple from the Little Rock Hash he had known for thirty years.

They were near a bricked pavilion filled with vending machines, and Rock noticed one that dispensed boxes of cash. He wasn't sure how the machine worked but suspected it would photograph anyone who made a withdrawal and then send a bill. With little further thought, he got a box and carried it back to camp.

Someone there saw Rock with it and looked at him as if he had lost his mind. "I can't believe you got one of those. Man, you're gonna owe them something like twenty-five percent interest on the money."

"Oh shit. I had no idea," Rock said.

At some point, for a reason he would never understand, Rock left the box unguarded on his folding chair for a few minutes before he realized what a huge mistake that had been. Keith Brown, though lovable and funny, was forever in gambling debt and notoriously untrustworthy among his friends. Rock hurried back to find cash from the box strewn about on the chair. He immediately turned to Donna.

"Do you think Keith got into this?" he said.

She looked at the open box and the money. "I don't know, but he probably did. What I don't understand is why you, of all people, got something like that. Why didn't you just go to a bank?"

Rock's bar district

At least one of the cops involved in the investigation suspected the first cop to drive by, just before dusk Sunday morning, though Rock's small white house comprised a bar district theretofore unknown in Levy. He based his assessment on lighting; because there were lamps turned on in both of the bedrooms, it looked from the street as though there were two late-night drinking establishments on the property.
Rock protested. "For starters, there were no lights on in the front bedroom until you guys woke me up," he said. "I mean, take a look around. Are y'all trying to tell me this looks like a bar district?"
He let out his cats and tried to go back to sleep but was up within minutes to drink from a plastic half-gallon bottle of Kroger-brand milk. Shortly thereafter he noticed that his watch and clocks were an hour behind the new time on his laptop.

Big funeral

Someone had scheduled an enormous funeral for someone, but Rock had almost no idea who had died. He figured the person was probably a sports figure since he was invited to attend.
Rock couldn't go because of work. There was a horse race scheduled for the same day, that very afternoon in fact, and he didn't want to go anyway, so he wrote a lengthy eulogy and had it delivered to a woman in charge. Unbeknownst to her, Rock watched as she read it and was pleased to see her cry. It meant his message mattered, he thought.

A tree and a kitten

They were on an old property out of town that Rock's dad Richard had owned for years, inside of a dilapidated trailer with two cats and a kitten. One of the cats, Pam, belonged to Rock, the other to Richard. Rock knew Pam had been spayed fourteen years earlier so assumed the kitten belonged to his dad's cat. He figured it didn't have long to live.
Rock followed his dad into the front yard, where he noticed a fresh, translucent sprout budding from a rotted branch of a tree he thought had died at least thirty years earlier.

Acting lessons

No one could quite figure out what the acting lessons were all about, but ninety minutes of them came with a deal Rock and several other people signed up for.
"No telling what they'll be," Rock told his friends at the office. "I guess they could have some value, depending on the teacher."

Breasts

His lesbian friend Susie and her girlfriend had a new roommate, and they invited Rock over to meet her, but he was not impressed. She seemed hard-edged and not at all pleased to meet this male friend of Susie's.
Regardless, it seemed completely bizarre to Rock that she almost immediately exposed her breasts to him.
"What to do you think he thinks about these, Susie?" she said.
Susie grimaced and lowered her forehead into the palms of her hands. "Oh, Rock, I'm sorry about this. I had no idea."

Doomed

A former Little Rock Hasher named Emon McHaney was at the wheel of his stylish convertible, and Rock was perfectly content and at ease in the passenger seat up front until they reached the top of an incline, high up above the Arkansas River Valley near Altus in the western part of Arkansas.
They began to descend and within seconds it was obvious to them that the road was far too steep. The car dropped into the air at least a thousand feet above farmland below, and McHaney and Rock fell from it and were in a free fall they could not possibly survive.
"Shit, we're not going to make it," Rock said.
"Yep, no doubt. This is it for us," McHaney said.
But as they approached the ground, Rock felt as though they had begun to decelerate. He suddenly thought they might live. They landed simultaneously, feet first. Rock felt intense pressure from above, as if someone were pressing on him, but it seemed at least potentially survivable.

Night life

There were a long line of bars and nightclubs lined up around Rock's front bedroom, and each one barked at him to come inside with a similar and very loud, monotonous tone. Such sources of night life had not appealed to him since his first or second year of college, so he hoped to find some place quiet and reserved, with middle-aged men smoking cigarettes and talking sports and politics, but it didn't appear there was an establishment like that anywhere in the room.
He walked into his den and wondered if the sounds would ever stop. It was 6:35 in the morning. The sun was coming up. It took another minute or two for him to realize that his alarm clock had rung since 6 a.m.

A new home

It seemed as though Jo needed a new home. Rock noticed that someone had marked on a list that she might be most compatible with a cat named Slovak, who he saw earlier in his house. He agreed with the assessment but wondered where Slovak had gone.
Rock got out of bed, saw Pam in his kitchen hoping for more of the canned food he fed her the day before and wondered whether someone had confused her for Slovak. Jo joined them, and Rock looked at the cats as they stood by a tea saucer on the kitchen floor that he had used as a feeding dish. Both girls were hungry but content. They were home.

What we want

It seemed nearly impossible for Rock to arrange his and his friend B.J.'s circumstances for the day. He wandered around his house looking for hints, but none seemed available. B.J. was humored by Rock's dark thoughts. "Man, you gotta come up with something better than all this," he said.
"I know," Rock said. "I know. Maybe I should look for something on my computer."
Two small Mounds bars left over from Halloween helped.

Head injuries

The huge press box was packed. The game wouldn't start for at least an hour, so Rock sat in a hospitality area with a plate loaded with onion rings, jalapeno poppers, and fried chicken wings. As he ate he noticed a blonde-headed boy about ten years old approach the deep fryer, which was set up in the middle of piles of fried food.
The fryer was empty of anything but sizzling oil, and the boy looked into it with a curious expression. Then, to Rock's horror, he fully submerged his head into the grease.
There were no signs of damage immediately after the boy pulled his head from the fryer, but his face was unnaturally and eerily pale, nearly white, almost as if it had been bleached.
Rock didn't have a cell phone with him and rushed to a group of older men on the other side of press box. "Does anyone have a phone I can use? We have a medical emergency."
As Rock dialed 911, he turned to see the boy had begun to vomit across the table, onto the food and Rock's equipment bag. Before an operator answered, he realized he didn't know know what town he was in. "What's the address of this press box?" he asked.
Of course no one knew. No one ever knows the address of stadiums. The men looked at Rock with barely disguised indignity and contempt. "Just tell her it's at the football stadium," one of them said.
Rock was embarrassed to have to ask the name of town but knew he had no choice.

Yard work

Three teenage boys walked across the street from their house and down Rock's driveway toward his backyard. They carried lawn tools, including a rake and a hedge trimmer. Confused, Rock walked out of his house and spoke to the boys just as they walked through a gate beside his garage. "Hey, fellows," he said. "What's up?"
They stopped and turned toward him with shy, embarrassed expressions. "Our dad sent us over here," one of them said. "He told us he wants us to clean up your backyard."

Dead air

There was a moment of panic for Rock moments after he climbed from his bed on Friday morning. It was a few minutes past nine o'clock, and he realized he hadn't played a single song from the cartridge they gave him for his new radio show. He remembered being in the studio earlier, while it was still dark, waiting with several of his co-hosts for a live group of jazz singers to finish.
Everyone at the station had seemed excited about Rock's show. It was primarily a talk format, with music sprinkled in, or at least that's what he thought he understood. But now he wasn't sure why he was at home. He was afraid for a moment that he had simply left the station in the middle of the show, driven to his house, and fallen asleep.

The top

Circumstances like this were sure to make even the best of Rock's days. Jenny Liberty had shown up at his door that morning from her home in Virginia, followed moments later by Chris and Erin from Corpus Christi. Their visits were completely unexpected, and Rock was pleased beyond reason.
It was a dark gray, cold snowy morning, and they road through it in Chris's enormous pickup truck for lunch in the Heights, where they gathered around a table in a small cafe.
They had already decided to order pizza but were still working on what kind when a slightly overweight, pretty blonde waitress walked up to take their order.
"Hi, y'all. What can I get you?"
"Well, we know we want pizza, but we haven't yet made up our minds what kind," Rock said. He turned to others. "Here. Y'all decide. I don't care what we get, so long as it doesn't have pineapple on it."
"But if you get a pineapple pizza, we'll give you a free slice of pineapple on the side," the waitress said. "That's our special today."
"Wait a minute," Rock said. "A free slice of pineapple. Heck, that might be enough to finally put me over the top."
His friends and the waitress laughed uproariously, which surprised him. He knew his thought was funny but thought it worthy of no more than a grin or wink.

The horses

Any time Claude Akins came to town when the court distributed thoroughbreds, there was no doubt he would have his choice. There were just two horses available this day, and everyone, including Rock, knew they were Akins's for the taking.
They were spectacular looking animals, both large, lean colts, one a bay, the other a chestnut. The bay, like Akins, was tall and dark and almost menacing in appearance.

Magnet

Someone at a run of the Little Rock Hash House Harriers asked Rock what he would want his obituary to say, and he said, "Rock, who died after he was shot by a 32-year-old husband with whose wife he was having an affair, was 106 and sharp as a fucking tack."

Later he sat back against a large boulder at the right side of a pretty woman named Trisha. Though her husband sat to her left, she leaned her head on Rock's shoulder. "You are so funny," she said. "I love you, Rock."

Seminar

The blonde looked like the sort of girl or woman who had attracted Rock as long as he could remember. He met her among a group of college students who, along with Rock and Todd Taylor, were making their way through a jobs seminar.
Rock and Todd were about thirty to thirty-five years older than anyone else there, including the blonde. They agreed she was lovely. Her hair was cut in a short, simple style, above her ears. She was a little over five-feet tall, weighed at most a hundred pounds, had blue eyes, and tiny features, highlighted by her small, soft mouth. Dressed in a simple, navy blue-tennis skirt, Rock assumed she was an outdoor girl.
It occurred in an instant to Rock that he had known her for several years and that she had never acted so much as remotely interested in him. They stood together at a table advertising the U.S. Army and Rock picked up a heavy, hardcover book with an olive drab cover. "Have you ever considered the military?" he said to her.
"No. I'm not at all interested."
"Really? You know the services, all of them, offer great perks."
"There's no way I'd join any of them. Absolutely no way."
She began to look around at the others around them, clearly it seemed looking for the young people she had arrived with.

The last ten stories

It had been fifteen years since Rock last edited newspaper copy, and he couldn't quite remember an old rule he learned back in the late 1980s, something about always starting with the last ten stories from the night before.
He scrambled through endless copy, but nothing made any sense. There was a story near the top about a high school football coach nearing retirement who had won several state championships. The coach hung plaques at his school that indicated the seasons his teams had done well, but it was nevertheless impossible for Rock isolate his championship teams.
Deadline was minutes away and he didn't have a single story ready for publication.

Terrorists

The elevator was packed. There must have been twenty people onboard, which amazed Rock. It ran along a transparent shaft on the northern side of the Democrat Building that offered a vibrant view of downtown Little Rock, which bustled with traffic and people in bright blue sunshine.
As Rock watched, a thin, sixty-year-old woman grabbed his arm in both hands. She looked panicked. "Please help me," she said. "There are terrorists in this building and they're trying to get me."
"OK, calm down. Where are they?" Rock was immediately skeptical. Everything seemed perfectly normal. He led the woman off the elevator into the building, which was crowded with people going about their jobs. She clung to his right arm as if she were in imminent danger, but nothing appeared unusual in any way.

Phone trouble

As soon as Rock walked into the sports office, assistant editor Matt Spencer asked if he could have a feature story about a tennis player ready for the next day's paper. It was early in the day, but Rock hadn't done anything concerning the story. No research; no interviews; nothing. "I'll tell you what, Matt. I'll do my best to have it for you, but don't commit me yet. I'll let you know one way or the other a little later this afternoon."
Before he started, he found that someone had removed the telephone from his desk. He began to look for it all around without luck. After a few minutes, he found an old, stained, pink phone under some rubbish near a wastepaper basket, but he soon realized it didn't work.
It had been at least five or six years since Rock had been inside the Democrat Building, and he had forgotten where the maintenance office was. He thought it was on the second floor, one floor down.
He couldn't believe the change. Rock opened the door from the stairwell and was stunned to see vast hallways with artwork everywhere. It looked like a modern museum. There were hundreds of people walking or riding bicycles as if they were outside. The walls were made of glass, and bright blue sunlight washed across everything.
Rock asked someone where the maintenance men worked. He was told their office was on the third floor and suddenly remembered its exact location from years earlier.

Dogs and cats

Rock was on a sidewalk near the front door to the apartment he rented a couple of days earlier. He was there to straighten things out and see what he needed to move from his house, which was in the same general area though about a mile away.
Two young women from an apartment next to his had just walked out to introduce themselves when Rock's cat Jo approached from a row of parked cars. It amazed Rock that she had taken so little time to find him.
Seconds after Jo appeared, Rock's other cats Pam and Samantha followed. Then came dogs named Scout and Soccoro. They belonged to friends of his from Texas, and he hadn't seen either in over a year.

Eternity

There was a loop of eternity connected to Rock's house, which he awoke to discover on a Saturday morning. He was in it and would remain there forever. All was taken care of. Nothing need be done.
However, he soon realized there were two puzzles he must overcome. One concerned a team boxing event and the other a box filled with a Santa Claus costume and Santa accessories.
The boxing tournament seemed to extend from his right hand, as if his fingers were the fighters. Once he recognized the absurdity of such a circumstance it cleared up. The Santa Claus stuff was in a box in his back bedroom and he knew any problem with it could be easily resolved. At some point he could take it to his garage.

The next brunette

The Dow Jones had bounced up and down all day, and Rock watched with interest as he sat on a pier at the lake where a friend of his kept a large sailboat.
A cute thirty-year-old woman with long brunette hair, a girl-next-door midwesterner Rock had known for years, walked onto the pier and sat beside him. "How's the market doing?" she said.
"It's hanging in there. I don't think anyone will get rich or go broke today."
She placed one of her palms on the back of his right hand and squeezed it softly, and he was immensely pleased. It was apparent to him that he had a new girlfriend.