American Pharoah

They were on the track at Churchill Downs. Rock was with two associates from the newspaper, circulation men he had known for twenty or more years, routinely said hello to, but whose names he couldn't recall and perhaps had never known, and they stood no more than fifty yards from the wire on the outside edge of the track as horses turned for home in the Kentucky Derby.
None of them knew why they were there. They couldn't even remember arriving in Louisville, but Rock felt a thud of hooves in his feet and heard the crowd begin to roar and didn't need a reason.
It was clear to them all that one horse had a substantial lead and was beginning to pull away. "Man, I hope that's American Pharoah," Rock said.
"Oh yeah, me to," one of his associates said.
They couldn't hear a track announcer and didn't know the horse's colors, so they couldn't be sure until he at last ran past them, when Rock made out the name American Pharoah on the saddle cloth as it bounced by.

The bed

Kayce Smith's new apartment was in the dimly lighted and perpetually dank hallway of the newspaper's basement, near the library, which did not seem at all odd to Rock.

Kayce had asked him to come look at the new bed she bought for one of her children. It looked to him like nothing more than a typical bedroll, but Kayce insisted he give it try. Sure enough, when Rock stretched out on it he found it as comfortable as a bed could be.

As he lay on this oddity, the sports department clerk Anthony Peace walked by, headed for the library. Rock turned to say hello, but before he could speak, he noticed Kayce's boyfriend Dan Chaney playing cards with several men in a back room.

He had walked down this hall two or three times a week for nearly twenty years and had never before noticed the room.

An odd Thanksgiving

Jeff and Jill Krupshaw and their children had hosted a fun and sometimes rambunctious Thanksgiving dinner at their house as long as Rock had known them. It always featured tons of perfect food, mostly prepared by Jill, and then hours of football watching, but on this particular Thanksgiving, things really got crazy.
Rock was surprised to see that Dan, Jeff's and Jill's 24-year-old son, had hired two boxers to stage a fight after dinner. Dan had put a ring in one of his sister's bedrooms, and he and several of his friends gathered around it. Rock watched from the doorway to see two enormous, obese men, nearly asleep it appeared, lean against one another until one finally slid down the other to the mat. He looked dead, Rock thought.
The first football game was on. Everyone moved from the crazy boxing match to the den. Rock took a seat on the carpet. He felt very sleepy, until someone opened the front door and at least twenty deer fawns charged into the house. The acted like slightly tamer versions of the raptors from Jurassic Park, clawing and biting enough to frighten everyone.

Tip debate

Fifteen Little Rock Hash House Harriers, including Rock, sat together at a local restaurant to discuss their roles in an upcoming project. They left after an hour, during which none of them ordered anything, though a young blonde waitress came by every few minutes to refill their water glasses.
Rock was the last to get up and noticed that no one had left a tip, so he opened his billfold and reached for a twenty as the waitress approached.
"Here, this is for you," Rock said.
"Oh, that's really not necessary," she said.
"Sure it is."
He handed her the bill but noticed it was a five. "Wait," he said. "I meant to make that a twenty."
"Oh no," the waitress said. "That would be way too much."
"No. No, I insist. In my mind, a tip shouldn't always be calculated as a percentage of the check. I know we didn't order anything, but you did a lot for us. Please, take this."
Rock now held a twenty, but the waitress instead reached into his billfold and pulled out a ten.
"Let's compromise," she said. "This will be plenty."
Rock looked in frustration toward a graying middle-aged man seated at an adjacent table.
"I wouldn't argue with her," the man said. "You got no chance."

A big story

Everyone was talking about an apparent murder-suicide, including Rock, who sat in the drivers seat of his car beside a young African American woman he barely knew. It was late at night, and they were in a parking lot near Clinton National Airport in Little Rock.
The day before, someone found a prominent middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter shot to death at their home in a ritzy Little Rock neighborhood.
"I wonder which one was the murderer," the woman said.
"It's hard to know for sure, of course, but I think I'd lean toward the daughter," Rock said.
"Why?"
"I don't know. It's just a little harder for me to a imagine a woman killing her child than the other way around."
"Yeah, but like you said, we don't know the circumstances."

Sad meeting

Former Arkansas-Little Rock head men's basketball coaches Steve Shield and Porter Mozer were together at Oaklawn Park. Someone told Rock they were there, and he was pleased. He looked around and saw them standing together near trainer Red Hartledge's box in the indoor grandstands, twenty-feet above and sixty-feet away from the one-sixteenth pole on the track. Rock approached them and said hello, but they seemed displeased by the meeting. They each shook his hand but looked away and seemed dismissive, nearly contemptuous Rock thought.

Salads

Walt dug into a salad bar, and Rock joined him. They used tongs to place large wedges of grilled romaine on their platters and then worked their way through hundreds of items. Rock decided he wanted more than his plate could hold, so he pulled a container of radishes from the bar and dumped its contents into a trash receptacle. He then filled it with the lettuce and Italian dressing and noticed through the vacancy that there were an enormous collection of toasted croutons inside. He began to pile them on his salad.
Walt appeared shocked. "Fuck, man. What are you doing?"
Rock immediately became self conscious. A manager approached. "Sir, that is not allowed."
He took the container from Rock and began to shut down the salad bar.
"Rock, what were you thinking?" Walt said. "Shit, this tops everything."

The swim meet

Walt and Rock wanted to golf at Rebsamen Park, but about fifteen-hundred professional endurance swimmers were gathered on the grounds and in the new banquet facility recently constructed on part of the old short nine course. Golfers were lined up for tee times on the regular course, so Rock suggested Walt join him for a look through the new building. "I've never seen it," he said.
"I haven't either," Walt said. "Have you heard anything about it?"
"No. Nothing."
"I've heard it's great."
They walked in through large glass double doors and recognized immediately that this was no mere banquet hall. It was more like a mall, filled with shops and boutiques and bars and restaurants, and it was crowded with shoppers, many in swim suits. The entire vast building, which stretched a quarter of a mile north to the bank of the Arkansas River, was covered by a shaded sun roof and filled with trees and shrubbery and long rectangular rail planters full of flowers. There was nothing else like this in the Little Rock metro.
Walt and Rock were stunned.

Two months after the holidays

It seemed to Rock that if he put his television antenna on top of the Christmas tree, he might get a better picture on at least a few channels. He wondered why he hadn't thought of it before, and then why there was still a Christmas tree in his house. It was late February and, wait a minute, he had lived in this house for thirteen years and had never once put up a tree.
Something or someone at that very minute tipped over a vase on a mantle covered with Christmas decorations. Rock heard the sound and turned to see a candy bowl filled with peppermint sticks and water. He looked around toward nearby workers and asked, "Why is this stuff still up two months after the holidays?"
As was typical for Rock in this sort of circumstance, it didn't seem at all odd that his house had suddenly become a newspaper newsroom.

Worker's error

At last Rock seemed to understand why one of the knobs on the middle of three drawers to his nightstand was missing. Apparently a worker once fell to the floor and needed to remove the knob to get up, perhaps as long ago as 2002, when Rock moved into this house.
Rock could see it from the worker's perspective. He was on his bedroom rug with his face aimed at the knob, which was still in place but with a horizontal crack on the drawer underneath it. When he laid his head down, Rock's face was pointed under the bed, where he noticed a framed painting leaned against an old fryer basket. Of course, Rock could see what the worker had done. Apparently in his fall, which also destroyed a nightstand lamp, he had not only loosened the knob but also knocked the painting from the wall.
Eventually Rock knew the damage was his responsibility and had occurred in the daylight no more than a few minutes ago, not thirteen years earlier. Severely hypoglycemic, Rock couldn't stand and considered crawling to the kitchen for nourishment.

Super storm

Surely every television in this hotel were tuned to weather reports. Rock, BJ, and Z Man were in Africa, in their room on an upper floor that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean, and they knew they had waited too long. They expected and feared imminent disaster.
Meteorologists around the world had unanimously declared that the hurricane, which was currently no more than an hour from the hotel, was by far the most powerful anyone had ever measured.
BJ said their only chance was good luck.
"No shit," Rock said.
The weathermen explained on television how the hurricane would demolish everything along its path. They said it would travel deeply into Africa before it turned clockwise to return to the Atlantic, where it would regain strength as it headed toward North America.
"I mean, there's no point in our leaving now," BJ said. "Where would we go? The fucking jungle?"
"We'd probably drown, Z Man said.
"No, man, we would definitely drown," Rock said. "BJ's right. We're better off right here."

A new take

It was difficult to know how expensive this would be. Of course Rock knew his medical insurance would cover it, but he was nevertheless curious.
An entire floor of a large downtown office building was reserved to help insulin-dependent diabetics maintain healthy blood glucose levels. There were at least a hundred employees on the floor to monitor how their customers behaved and what they consumed. Everything was measured precisely. Rock took his usual morning dose of long-term insulin and was fed half a cup of walnuts and then asked to jog for two minutes. He would continue to exercise and to eat small measures of food throughout the day and to have his blood-glucose level checked at least hourly.
Rock knew he was hungry and hypoglycemic and that this was all unnecessary.

Too tall

It would be the tallest building in Arkansas, and Rock would oversee the people who built it.
Rock also hired a crew whose job was to confirm the building's height. This would require an electronic device designed to measure the pitch of tones, which Rock had determined were directly correlated to the height of physical structures. By the time the building was complete, the pitch should be high enough to render it nearly inaudible.
In this particular case, the pitch began to drive people mad. It was even bothersome to Rock as he slept at home, four miles from the construction site.

Play by play

Football season was finally at hand, and Rock sat with two friends in one of their apartments to watch the season opener on television.
Rock asked his friends whether they had ever listened to a game on the radio while driving and become so immersed in the broadcast that the inside of their car became the stadium itself. They both said it was a common experience for them.
"It's an amazing thing," Rock said. "I just love to hear the voice of a good radio man paint the picture: 'Johnson steps back into the pocket. There's pressure to his right. He scrambles further back, still looking downfield, and he has Ferguson wide open on a fly pattern thirty yards away, and the deep pass finds him. Ferguson makes the catch and has clear sailing to the end zone.' "