Coronavirus

Everyone was sick. The trainers, the horses, Rock, and half the people in the Oaklawn press box felt awful. A trainer named Robertino Diodoro joked that the coronavirus had found its way to Hot Springs. All Rock knew for sure was that it had been sixteen years and eleven months since he had been this ill
The stakes for Arkansas-bred horses was scheduled for early Sunday morning, but it looked as if it would be postponed until at least the horses began to feel better. Either way, Rock didn't want to get out of bed. He hoped his cat Joe didn't get sick, all curled up as he was beside Rock's pillow in Levy.

Deeply engaged

Rock's father Richard was deeply engaged in a novel. He sat across from Rock in a small cafe that could have doubled as a library. It was time to go, Rock knew. His mother Jane was in their car in the parking lot, but his father was consumed by the book, so much so that he made notes on a yellow legal pad as he read.
Rock finally got him to agree to leave, but as they walked toward the car, Rock noticed an offtrack betting facility in a wing of the strip mall to his left. He had completely forgotten there was a bet he intended to make, an exacta on two horses who were currently at odds of 5-1 and 7-1. The place had a tote board on its roof, visible in the dark of six p.m. all the way to Central Avenue.

Just sit put

Someone had set up some kind of run for the Little Rock Hash House Harriers that did not require their actual participation. They could just sit put, or lie prone, and feel as if they were on the run.
Rock was with a group not far from his house on a run up and down steep wooded hills, and yet he could sense his cat Joe curled in a ball next to a pillow tucked under his head on his back bedroom bed.

Thunderstorm

As a thunderstorm rolled through Levy late on a Tuesday night, Rock lay in his back-bedroom bed. He tried to watch a cops-and-robbers shootout on a black-and-white television he didn't know he owned, but the loud thunder interfered with the show.
There was something else, too. Voices from his dead neighbor Tom's backyard and perhaps, yes, gunfire. Real gunfire. Rock was suddenly filled with panic.

Cats

The trick was to pick up the cats and place them in one of several large plastic pitchers of lemonade Rock's uncle Jim Aikman had placed on a picnic table near the softball field. The idea, introduced by Jim, was to turn the cats into softball players, which made perfect sense to Rock.
"The only thing I don't understand is, how are they able to hold a bat?" Rock said.
He asked this as he struggled with a very aggressive, shaggy fifteen-pound yellow version of the cats around the table. There would be no getting this flailing animal into a pitcher of lemonade, he thought, but before his assessment took hold and Jim answered his question, Rock could see that one of the cats had grown to the size of a typical outfielder. Its hands had opposable thumbs. He wore a pinstriped uniform and had already begun to take practice swings.
Rock also noticed the pitchers were the size of garbage cans. All he would have to do is drop this crazed cat in.

An oversight

Someone tried to enlist Rock's help in a count of consecutive NCAA Division I indoor track and field championships won by the Arkansas Razorbacks, but he had no idea. He didn't even know they were on any kind of meaningful streak.
Sure, Rock and everyone else in Arkansas understood the significance of the Razorbacks' reign as the nations' premiere track program, a nearly forty-year run begun in 1982, five-years after the school hired John McDonnell as its head track coach. Rock knew much about it, but these people said the indoor team had won somewhere in the neighborhood of one-hundred or more consecutive national championships. They showed him charts and graphs on his laptop. It was clear the streak was very long, but Rock couldn't figure out how to find its length. There were no obvious lists, which seemed an incredible oversight. Why had these people come to him, he wondered.

Carry

Grouped with Arkansas State Golf Association president Jay Fox and two of his carbon-copy golfing friends, Rock's drive traveled nearly five-hundred yards. They were on the first hole of a course unfamiliar to Rock, an uphill par-five that demanded carry over its entire length. Most of what should have been a fairway was a rock-strewn, narrow hiking trail that led to a green at least one-hundred feet above the tee box.
None of Rock's partners had seen his drive, but the ball was about five feet short and right of the green. He pointed it out to Jay, who—along with his friends—seemed unimpressed, even put out a bit.

Types of meat

He did not know why, but Rock had agreed to buy three tubular, metal containers, each filled with at least a gallon of micro-brewed beer, and three stacks of sandwich meat, each several inches thick.
Rock was with fellow sportswriter Tim Cooper in an old grocery store that also sold hardware and outdoor supplies, similar to a classic southern general store. Apparently, the owner, an overweight man in a dirty white apron was responsible for Rock's purchases. He had shown him a choice of several types of meat, huge piles of each on sheets of wax paper, and some beer Rock knew he would not like but could not resist.
"Your the first person who ever turned down bacon," the grocer said.
"I can get bacon anywhere," Rock said.
As he walked with the meat and beer toward his car, Rock couldn't imagine why he had purchased this stuff. He wondered if Coop would take it.

Incredible worry

After a careful examination of the internet report of his utility bills on his laptop, Rock realized he had long paid water bills for at least two friends with the Little Rock Hash House Harriers. One was a seventy-five-year-old man named Bob McKinney, who lived in a four-hundred thousand dollar west Little Rock home and had multiple adult children and many grandchildren. The other was a former girlfriend named Jenny Devine, who now lived with her husband—an airline pilot for Delta—and two teenaged children in a New Jersey suburb of New York City.
This seemed incredible. Rock knew his own water bill had run twenty-five dollars a month for the last seventeen years, but he didn't think he could possibly have paid fifty dollars a month for the last twenty without knowing it.
He was awake now, sitting in 9 a.m. daylight on his living room couch. Rock walked into his bathroom and saw that his cat Joe had shredded toilet paper that hung toward the floor from the roller on the wall above. He figured this was somehow correlated to his having cut off another Hasher's electricity bill he had also paid for years.
Rock wondered why he wasn't broke, but his worry gradually dispersed as he began to more-clearly realize none of these things were possible.

Full-frontal nudity

Rock had watched television reruns most of his life, beginning with Sky King in 1962, followed by I Love Lucy, My Three Sons, Andy Griffith, with a middling period dominated by Coach, the Star Trek renewals, and, of course, Seinfeld, all the way to The King of Queens, but he had never seen this particular program, or even heard of it, which kind of shocked him.
In his den in Levy, right before him, was a Seinfeld episode with full-frontal nudity. Jerry and Elaine walked around in Jerry's apartment buck naked. The thing was, it was actually kind of funny, and also a bit gross, both characterizations augmented by each actor's new obesity.
This show aired thirty years earlier, and Rock couldn't imagine how he had never known about it.

Just like that

It came to Rock's attention that the talk-radio station he had worked for nearly thirty years earlier had shut down its programming. Just like that, overnight, the station had let all its employees go and begun to present a format of dead air.
Aging members of Rock's former audience—mostly sentimental old men—asked him to volunteer for a mid-morning shift and, just like that, he was behind a microphone at ten in the morning on a signal that covered more than half the state's population. He was totally unprepared, and already people called to ask his take on matters he knew nothing about.
During Rock's run as a radio host, he took hours to memorize names and statistics, like a serious science student on evenings and mornings before tests. On this day, he had no choice but to wing his answers. The difference in this circumstance was that everyone, including listeners, understood. He was consequently at ease.

The Cleveland Browns

Andy Reid, head coach for the NFL's Cleveland Browns, had not been able to find a placekicker willing to so much as kick an extra point for his team. He finally settled on a black and gray tabby housecat, but with a game on the line, the cat was curled up near the endzone in Rock's living room-den, next to a long white couch that had been knocked back into a dining area adjacent to the kitchen.
The cat would not wake up. Obviously, kicking a football was out of the question.
Rock soon realized this had gone on for most of the season, and in fact had begun to draw national attention. Television crews wanted in, so he decided to move the couch and coffee table back into place and restack a pile of books that were strewn across the den's large burgundy rug.

Coach Sieg

Athletes from UALR's track teams were spread across Verizon Arena in North Little Rock. Rock hadn't been in the facility since the winter and spring of 2009 when he covered the Arkansas Twisters' final season of arena football and had wandered in through the back bay door just to look around.
Rock's attention was drawn first by two young men as they sprinted above him, each on two translucent six-inch-wide strips of plastic, stretched six inches apart, fifteen feet above the floor of the facility.
Before he could find anyone to ask about this anomaly, he heard a familiar voice.
"Hey, Rock. How've you been?"
Rock turned to see a man he immediately recognized as the last of the Twisters' head coaches.
"Hey Coach, I'm fine," Rock said. "It's good to see you again, man."
Typical of this experience, common now in the twilight of Rock's long career as a sportswriter, here was another of the thousands of coaches or athletes from his experience whose names he could not remember, at least not immediately. He dug deep, and quickly, to remember this man's last name was perhaps Siegfried. Yes. He had called him Coach Sieg.
"Same here, Rock. Do you still write for the paper?"
"I do, Coach Sieg. How about you? What are you doing these days?"
"For the time being, not much," he said. "In fact, I'm looking for work. Do you know if the Twisters have an opening?"
"Coach. Didn't you know? The Twisters haven't played since your last season here, you know, whenever that was, ten years ago."

Last chance

At least a twinge of sentimentality had apparently run through several of Joe T. Robinson High School's football coaches. Their team had played in a new stadium for several years, and the old field, located on a ridge above the school, had eroded away to no more than a thirty-yard stretch of dirt.
As Rock watched a few of Robinson's assistant coaches play a pickup game on the old site, another coach told him plans were underway to remove it. The coach said his friends were afraid this might be their last chance to play on the field they had used when they played for the school.