Ron and his machine

A group of Little Rock Hash House Harriers, including Rock, drank beer in the corridor of an abandoned split-level shopping mall in North Little Rock after a five-mile run.
There were more Hashers still out, and Rock walked to a rail that overlooked the lower level to watch them come in. He was interested to see how they reacted as they approached three nearly verticle rows of escalators. The steps were gone, so there was nothing but a smooth surface to negotiate. It was clear that runners and walkers would have to find a different way up, but Rock saw three Hashers approach the escalators on snowmobiles.
Two were on large, powerful machines. The other, Rock's longtime friend Ron Gimblet, rode an older, smaller model, and Rock could hear it sputter as Ron began his nearly 100-foot ascent. The first two snowmobiles easily made the summit, but Ron's failed near the top, and he and his machine were nearly instantly in a backward freefall. Rock was horrified to see Ron bounce on the tile below, come to rest, and lay motionless. He turned back toward the Hashers in the corridor and yelled, "Someone call 911! There's been a fall!"
He began to run toward the top of the escalators but stopped short. "It's Ron! Tell them to expect head and neck injuries!"

Butch

It was Butch. Rock had no doubt. Butch had been dognapped from the Walsh Estate on 35th Street twenty-five years earlier, but here he was, a gray, thirty-one-year-old Boxer plopped on a couch next to Rock's brother Jim.

There were a half-dozen new-age flower children gathered in the old living room Rock had shared with Tall Bob and Tina all those years ago, and they watched as Rock sat on the couch and Butch curled against his ribcage, placed his front paws on his shoulders, and licked his face.
Rock was overjoyed.

"Butch," Rock said. "Where the fuck have you been?"

Horse people

Rock had written a story about a thoroughbred owner and breeder from a ranch in northern Arkansas near Marshall. The next day he received a series of emails and text messages, all of which read: "Rock, I am a lot richer than you think."
Rock wasn't sure how to respond, but considered, "I'm glad to hear it", and, "It's too bad everyone can't say that."
All he knew for certain was that he had exactly twenty-five minutes to get to the War Memorial Golf Course parking lot. Fuck these horse people. Get outa my way, douche bag.

The Presbyterian Red Skin

Presbyterian College recently opened a branch in Russellville, Arkansas. It was near Crawford Elementary—where Rock attended third and fourth grade—about three-quarters of a mile east of the Arkansas Tech campus.
Rock had walked there from a fast-food Mexican restaurant on El Paso Street and found it looked remarkably similar to the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, with the same rolling hills he remembered from graduate school. The school's athletic teams were known as the Red Skin, which reminded Rock of the main campus, Presbyterian College in South Carolina, whose mascot were the Blue Hose.
On his way back to the Mexican Restaurant, Rock got lost in a maze of city streets and dense woodlands. He at last came upon a cliff from which he could see the neighborhoods near Tech, but to get to them would demand he leap into the top of a one-hundred-foot tree. As dangerous as he knew that would be, the climb from the top and height of the lowest branches would also put him in peril. Rock did not believe he was likely to survive this descent, but he knew of no other route back to civilization.

Softball

It was close to midnight, the deadline for the state of Arkansas to execute a man found guilty of murder. Rock waited with a large group of reporters in the parking lot of the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Corrections, where the prisoner was scheduled to die by lethal injection.
One of the television anchors, Greg O'Neil, a man Rock had known since the late 1970s, opened his car trunk, which was filled with softball gloves, balls, and bats.
"Anyone interested in a game?" O'Neil said.
It was a hazy, hot afternoon, but everyone seemed eager to play.

Bleeding

Rock was dressed in a new pair of red racing flats, and red running shorts and singlet. He ran fast onto what he thought and hoped was a loop off the main highway outside of town and past a young boy and girl. He wondered whether they could tell him if he was indeed on a loop that led back to the highway, but they didn't know.
The girl commented on his dress. "Is your favorite color red?"
Rock continued on his way until he passed four men in their early twenties. He could tell they were each intoxicated. One of them, clearly the group's leader, let Rock know he was on the proper path back to the highway.
It took a minute before Rock saw evidence that these young men had been in a car wreck. One was bleeding profusely from his right arm.

Rachel

There was a rumor going about that Rock and actress Rachel Welch had engaged in an inappropriate relationship, perhaps sexual in nature. It was spurred by several sightings of the two walking together on a rural state highway north of the Little Rock Air Force Base, not far from Vilonia.
Rock said the whole idea was ridiculous. "Just go check," he said. "I was in the middle of a fifty-mile walk, and we just happened to cross paths for a while."
Someone reported they had seen Rock and Welch kissing.
"I have no memory of that," Rock said.

The way it works

A light warm mist fell across the gray daybreak and backstretch barns of Oaklawn Park as Rock and his new girlfriend walked toward the stables of Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas.
Rock's cat Jo was there when they arrived. She knew all there was to know about horse racing, so Rock let her guide his date around the barn. Jo was wide-eyed and seemed thrilled by this opportunity to demonstrate her expertise.
After a bit of furniture upheaval, Rock ate a tube of Gu and realized that Jo, an otherwise remarkable house cat, knew little to nothing about the training of racehorses.
He was momentarily disappointed.

Firecracker

The time had come for yet another advance story for the Firecracker Fast 5K, and as far as Rock was concerned, the most notable element of this year's race was that, two days before the Fourth, only fifty people had registered. He began his story with the contrast between last summer's Firecracker, when a record crowd of over sixteen-hundred ran, and the present race, which had thus far generated sparse interest. The only thing Rock needed was to find the name of the fiftieth person to register.
Early on race day, it was clear that a late rush of entrants would put in place a field more typical in numbers of recent Firecrackers. The new oddity was that the race would begin and end indoors, in what looked like an old school building. Rock helped his friend Tom Zaloudek construct wooden banked curves around several tight hallway turns.

Russellville won

Russellville and Greenwood played for the Arkansas Class 6A football championship, but days later, Rock still didn't know which school won. He spoke of his frustration to a group of apparently homeless people in the hallway of the Democrat Building basement, from whom he got one response.
It came from a young man with shaggy blonde hair, dressed in old jeans and a tattered, wrinkled polo shirt, who said he was a Greenwood High dropout. He told Rock that all he knew was that Russellville won. "I don't have any idea what the score was," he said. "I heard your guys have a great quarterback."