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.