An embarrassment

 There were characters in Rock's house he recognized from several Star Trek television series, including Reginald Barkley, an oddball from a handful of episodes of The Next Generation and Voyager. Someone told Rock this would be a long-term arrangement, set up for no more than a test of its durability. It all seemed unbelievable, and Rock wondered how long he could avoid the embarrassment of a house filled with adults dressed in uniforms from the United Federation of Planets. This might be enough to make his property a Levy laughingstock.

A shout for help

 Until the boy slid in mud to the bottom of a deep ditch near the fieldhouse, everything had gone well for Rock as he began work on a preseason story about Oak Grove High's football team. Oak Grove's coaches were glad to see him, and most of the players remembered him from the season before. One of those players was a typical overweight lineman, an African American underclassman who stumbled near the top of the fifteen-foot ditch into boulders, slick grime, and the two or three feet of water at its base. He lay motionless. "Do you think he's okay?" a coach said. "No, I don't believe so," Rock said as he began his slide toward the player. The boy appeared unconscious, perhaps dead, when Rock reached him. Rock lifted the boy's head from the water and shouted for help.

The Downtown Y

 The Downtown Little Rock YMCA closed in 1994, and Rock was surprised to see how much its interior had dilapidated. One of the basketball courts was dank, dingy, and strewn with cobwebs. Water dripped from the dark ceiling, just above the old wooden one-hundred and sixty-yard track that circled the court's perimeter, twenty feet above. Rock was last in this building a year before it was shuttered, there to interview a high school basketball player with a transplanted heart, and now he couldn't remember how to exit. He took the closest door he saw from the court and walked into a sparkling new room with a skylight above its fantastically complex weight machine. As he entered, he noticed a twin bed, dresser, and desk several steps above the weights. Just as it registered he might be in someone's private room, a college-aged man walked in. "Is this your room?" Rock said. The youngster looked frightened, and he stepped back out to the street and pulled the door shut behind him. Rock hoped the police wouldn't come.