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Crutch seemed particularly interested in a twenty-five-year-old pair of golf shoes, white Nikes with outdated metal spikes.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.