Five Miles to Rockingham Road
by Zack Harmes
The man swam out of the pre-dawn darkness. His face fish-belly white, dirty blonde hair pasted to his forehead by the rain. Meth skinny. Clothes damp. “Yo, bro-ski, you got the time?” he asked, tapping two fingers against his wrist. As if he was late for a meeting, like he hadn’t watched from the alley since the moment I parked my truck outside the bar.
“Five forty-five,” I said. The sunrise was due any minute, and that was my deadline. I was behind schedule because the hotel I’d just come from ordered more beer kegs than usual. It was Thursday. Keg day.
Rain meant spring was coming. Patios were opening, and everyone ordered beer on tap. I had seventy-two kegs on the truck, a new record, getting heavier as the days grew warmer.
“Cool, cool, cool,” he said, and stepped backwards under the awning. The empty, darkened windows of downtown Davenport reflected the copper shine of sodium street lamps. The doors were all locked.
He tore off a stained hoodie, stripping down to a dirty tee and a pair of black jeans, swinging his arms, swiveling his head constantly up and down the street.
I rested my arm on the handle of my two-wheeled cart, watching him. I believe in multiple universes and alternate realities.
In this one, I was about to be robbed.
~
Six months before I had crashed and burned. I’d left active service with the Army National Guard, where I had been a recruiter for four years. There was every excuse, but the truth is I was tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix. I lost sight of the mission. My heart wasn’t in it anymore. My plan B didn’t work out, which left me with plan C. The problem was that there was no plan C.
So, I applied for a job as a beer man. Class A CDL truck driver. They were willing to train. Twenty-one bucks an hour. That isn’t much anymore, but drivers also got free beer on Fridays. I aced the interview and was waiting for an offer.
The first of the late fees started rolling in. The disconnection notices weren’t far behind. I was robbing Peter and robbing Paul to keep the lights on. One night, after the kids had gone to bed, my wife asked me, “Are we going to be okay?”
“We gotta be,” I told her. There were six kids counting on us.
I believe in multiple universes and alternate realities. In one of them, I have a rich uncle. It was not this one.
Life brings us intersections. They are great places to change lanes. I told her I wanted to make an attempt at writing, and writing seriously. Somewhere between Hawaii and Alaska, between Iowa City and the Des Moines Military Entrance Processing Station, the dream was discarded on the side of the road. I had a Word document full of thoughts accumulated over a decade of soldiering. The odds seemed unlikely that I could pull a story out of there, but it was all I had.
Some spouses laugh when they hear that. Others cry. My wife stayed awake for hours that night, scouring submissions calls.
I woke up the next morning to a link she texted me. A magazine was running an international writing contest. No entry fee. All genres welcome. Blind judging to ensure it was about the words, not the author. Best of all, the huge cash prize and custom story illustrations for the top three winners. Only one hitch: my story was 6,000 words over the acceptable limit, with a deadline in three days.
So, I cut.
I gutted whole scenes. I carved almost every bit of dialogue. I slashed character’s names. The more I trimmed, the stronger the story became. Hours before the deadline, though, two problems remained: I had a beginning I didn’t like, and no ending at all.
Exhausted, I retreated to the back alley for a cigarette. I searched the gray clouds for words worth remembering, my thoughts turning to the soldiers I had once been counted amongst—all of us in formation, arranged in neat and ordered rows, faceless in the darkness of pre-dawn. Shoulder to shoulder we stood, a machine waiting upon a single command to set loose the anger boiling inside. Together, we told the same story that transcends generations. Alone, those stories warped and twisted and went untold.
In my alley, searching for the right words, I lit a smoke and examined the pack. All those cigarettes crammed in there, standing at attention, perfectly ordered.
Just like us.
Then it hit me.
The words fell from the sky.
~
Writers deal in imagination, even if the odds of success are unlikely. I named my story “Five Miles to Epworth” after a road sign I passed every time I returned from training. I’d never seen a road sign that measured distance that short; I took it as an omen that success can happen if you bet on yourself.
And in this gamble, there was no time for feedback, and only minutes left before the deadline. The winners wouldn’t be announced until spring, so I made a vow: until then, write as many words as possible. If I won, I would have a body of work to build a new career on. If I lost, I would give it all up.
With time racing, I gave everything a once-over, and it wasn’t until this last glance that the name of the magazine struck me—Story Unlikely. Not as remarkable or unusual, poignant or pretty, but simply the odds this cosmic gambler was giving himself.
Unlikely.
I hit submit.
~
I was a steel-toed angel in service to the Patron Saint of Good Times, a genie trapped in a longneck bottle, the prophet of pretty lies and broken hearts, harbinger of fun and friend to all. With the stitched sigil of Budweiser on my chest, I brought the amber word from the King himself. The word was this: “drink.” “And drink some more.”
All heads swerved upon my arrival. They leapt before me, parting on the sidewalk, flattening themselves against the walls as if I were a doctor racing to save a gasping man. “Clear a path, give him room!” Doors were held open, and heads bowed. The Man was on the clock, with places to be.
I’ve carried a gun and worn a flag on my shoulder, but I was never treated like a real American Hero until I bore the “crimson crown.” Life is funny like that. It all depends on who you work for.
My kingdom stretched from BeerTini’s on Rockingham Road to Armored Gardens on the shores of the Mississippi River. Every bar, gas station, bodega, and restaurant stood between me and clocking out. The trucks rolled between midnight and 3 a.m. For those quiet hours, I was lord of the rainswept neon avenues, snaking through alleys and parking the wrong way on one-way streets. The city was my playground. My boss told me traffic laws don’t apply to a Beer Man. “You can do whatever you want, as long as you have the hazards on.”
This was the Valley of Third Shift, in the notorious West End where people got shot. The houses were old, and every door was locked. The bars opened at six in the morning and served breakfast. It was a place to blunt the sharp edge of a twelve-hour shift at the Purina factory.
The route was case-heavy but keg-light, meaning on an average day the truck was loaded with over nine hundred cases of bottles and cans, usually about ten kegs. Thursday was the only exception, where I never had less than fifty kegs but only three hundred cases. Most of the kegs went to the Armored Gardens, which never ordered less than thirty half-barrels. Sales equal gallons, and the people of Iowa are drowning in Busch Light. The truck was always considerably lighter afterwards, and the day got easier. I looked forward to Thursdays.
After delivering to Armored Gardens, I took a smoke break at a hipster bar called The Raccoon Motel. I timed my pace to meet the rising sun by the Rock Island Bridge. I walked around the corner to watch the first rays dapple the roiling Mississippi River, the last shadows of the night melting away in a fury of blazing orange. Rain clouds boiled on the horizon, as if lit from within by a nuclear candle. Like they were made of golden smoke and pinkish cream. If there is a God, I think He paints in watercolor.
The day stretched before me with infinite possibilities. Anything could happen. Today could be the day I get news that I won the contest, that the window of opportunity had finally cracked open enough for me to squeeze a fingernail underneath. All I needed was one lucky break, one chance to prove I could do it. Today could be the fulfillment of a dream, a lifetime in the making.
It could also be the day I’m served with wage garnishment papers. The phone rang every hour from creditors who told me how much they were dying to hear the sound of my voice. The messages they left were filled with reassurances that I wasn’t alone and forgotten in the world. One of my co-workers once asked me, “Who inspired you to write?”
I told him, “Capital One.”
One day, the book I write will be dedicated to everyone listed on my credit report.
Fifteen minutes of nicotine and peace. Fifteen minutes where nothing could be taken from me. I looked forward to it every Thursday, and then it was back to work, back to my little kingdom.
The one that stretched—if you counted the zigs and counted the zags—about five miles.
~
In the alley, meth guy circled my truck, glancing down the street for cops. Time to move on; I could return later. I stacked the kegs in their bays and closed the doors, and started to climb into the cab when I remembered that the front door of the bar was unlocked.
I walked to the doors, put the key in, and snapped the latch. When I turned around, the guy was right there.
“Isn’t this great?” He opened his arms wide and gestured towards the river two blocks away. “I love this shit, man. Early morning. It’s dark. It’s quiet. Ain’t nobody around.” He said this between gritted teeth, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “Nobody ’cept you and me.”
It was the way he said it that I’ll never forget. There was a message there. A wise man once told me, “Words mean things.”
This guy’s words, in the early morning darkness, in the rain that never seemed to end, meant nobody was coming to save me.
~
If you take a drive down Rockingham Road, you’ll see the remains, like an old, abandoned parade: rusted bumpers, cracked windshields, metal fibers poking out of bald tires. But the bars are full, and the coolers stocked: alcohol sales rise when the economy sags.
People drink when they are sad.
The homeless wander the city on bicycles, moving like deer to stay warm in the gloom of pre-dawn. I saw them, bleary-eyed men and women in tattered hoodies and ragged shoes. One foot in the gutter, one in the grave, and all that separated them from me was one bad day. They scoured the sidewalks for quarters, forming lines at gas stations, when they opened at six, to buy the only thing they cared about: Earthquake Malt Liquor.
Earthquake tasted like Budweiser stirred into diesel fuel, with a twist of lime pulled from the bottom of a sink drain. But it’s 10% ABV and only $1.19 for a 25oz can. It used to be a dollar, back when a dollar meant something. Five quarters will still buy you thirty minutes of feeling good, and that’s a pretty good deal whether you sleep outside or not.
Dave Ramsay says every dollar should have a job. Some years, one job isn’t enough.
I was still a soldier in the National Guard one weekend a month, but the money hole was too deep. I needed another shovel. So I picked up work on Saturdays with a local appliance company, installing washers, dryers, and stoves. I once installed a five-thousand-dollar refrigerator in a Midwestern mansion. It had a touch screen and sent texts to the owner whenever a vegetable was about to expire. The guy complained because it wouldn’t stay connected to Wi‑Fi.
When my own fridge lightbulb went out, I never replaced it—fewer watts meant pennies saved. It all adds up over time.
Three jobs kept the interest rates at bay, but it took everything I had. I drifted in a constant state of exhaustion. I would race home to write before the caffeine wore off. Stephen King writes two thousand words a day, and he does it full time. I had an hour every day, and I aimed for two thousand words, too. If you want to be a pro, you do what the pros do. If you’re playing catch-up, you do it faster.
I wrote ten short stories. One became “Hell’s Greatest Dad,” another became “The Star Sailor.” I wrote a sixty-thousand-word novel. If you read the first draft, you can see the moment I started to fall asleep while typing. The prose degrades about every six pages and becomes choppy, the sentences short. “He looked up and saw them. He got scared and ran.” You can’t edit a blank page. My rule was this: finish it first, apply lipstick later.
It had been a cold winter. My car’s heater broke. I didn’t have the cash to fix it. There are some authors out there who scoff at a $3,000 advance. That year I would have sold the rights to my book for $417.35 exactly. Jealousy became a smoldering ember banked in the cold ash of rock bottom. It drove me to grind words together in hopes that one of these stories would be the spark that set fire to all.
One day I would remember what it felt like to be warm.
~
A man can guzzle hatred as easily as beer. I’d fall asleep to the sounds of my children’s muffled laughter before the sun even set. “Dad can’t watch a movie, girls, he’s got to get up early.” That was my wife, who did everything I was too tired to, who made life worth living. She whisked the kids to parks and pools, to forested trails and sandy riverbanks. She taught them to paint. She was their seasonal guide: piling up mountains of leaves in the fall, rolling snowmen in the long dark of the winter, then chasing the kids back outside when it warmed up, water balloons in tow. Even in the daily grind—something as simple as letting them pick out the cereal—she reminded them they could because their dad worked hard to pay for it.
Those were the things that put my boots on at midnight.
Some nights, though, I was too drunk on anger to sleep. My thoughts raced through a shrinking list of financial strategies. The experts recommend selling anything of cash value, so, just like my story, I cut. I slashed. I gutted all the excess.
How can you estimate the value of your life? All those cluttered corners have a price tag, and in a liquidation, you learn just how little it’s worth. When I scraped the bottom of everything I had to sell, I was left with only one question: if I could live without something for a month, did I ever really need it?
Funny thing is, of all that I sold to stay afloat, I can’t recall a single item. All I remember is what my wife surprised me with for my birthday.
I clocked out from work and drove home, smelling of beer and rainwater. My whole family waited for me on the porch, smirking, hands behind their backs. When I approached, they handed me gifts wrapped in yellow plastic Dollar General bags,
“For your writing,” my wife said. “Sorry it’s nothing fancy.”
Notebooks, Bic pens, and an orange Monster Energy drink.
A new question emerged: is the potential of a blank page more valuable than an atrocious first draft? How likely are the odds that your words will ever be sold? Do the odds not multiply when more stories are penned?
I have kept the notebook by the bedside.
I have filled every page.
I have drained the ink from every pen.
And I have asked for these same gifts every birthday since.
All it takes is one. One story somebody remembers. One reader who shares it with another. One true sentence they never forget. People think one isn’t important, and they are wrong. One is the entire world if you give that one everything you’ve got.
I believe in multiple universes and alternate realities. In one, I’m the rich uncle.
All it takes is one.
~
I won my first writing contest at sixteen. It wasn’t a professional publication, only a Local Area Arts Council program in Trinidad, Colorado. I sent a twenty-thousand-word novella to my English teacher and asked him to help me edit it. That day was also the deadline for the contest, so he submitted it even though it was only a first draft, typos and all. Apparently, last-minute deadlines are my specialty.
A month later, they called to let me know I had taken first place. The day of the awards ceremony, they surprised me with an author’s table and ten, small, printed books of my story. For a day, I was a real author.
I took first place in the same contest the next year, and second place the final year. That same English teacher wrote me a recommendation to attend the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio. It was the first time I’d ever heard of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the first time I’d met anyone who cared about crafting stories as much as I did.
After high school, I packed my life into a Buick Century and drove from Colorado to Iowa. My goal was to write a novel and become a teacher. I would change the world through willpower and infectious positivity. Everybody is dumb when they are young, but part of me still thinks I can.
In Iowa City, I never wrote my novel. Mostly, I drank beer and worked overtime, but I did manage to teach creative writing to a group of middle schoolers at a summer program in Davenport. A friend ran the course full-time and needed help. She knew I was a writer. We drove from Iowa City to downtown Davenport to a building called the Bucktown Center for the Arts. I saw Iowa, in summer glory, the way I think everyone should: in an old convertible with the top down.
The students were awkward and shy, and that was okay. I made them write, made them read “ ‘Repent Harlequinn!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison. I built a lesson around the structure of that piece: not all stories start at the beginning. The point was that writing is not like time—it doesn’t have to be linear. An author can take the reader from point to point, so long as it’s done with grace and skill.
Like all young teachers, I learned that you can move too quickly. We finished early with time to kill. Foreseeing that, I’d brought a bucket of sidewalk chalk. I walked them outside, and they scrawled a collaborative poem on the concrete. One writer followed another, each scratching a line, until it stretched for two city blocks.
I wish I’d written it down, but that would have destroyed the point. There is value in the absence of permanence. You can’t monetize everything. You must learn to create for sheer joy.
But I’ll never forget the look on one kid's face, eyes wide behind thick black-framed glasses, as lightning struck his mind and turned his thoughts to fire. Someone wrote the line, “I stand under a glaring sun,” and the young kid spoke out loud, eyebrows shot up, “And paint daydreams of the moon.”
Thirteen years and two blocks from this moment, a man would try to rob me outside of a bar called The Armored Gardens.
~
“Nobody ’cept you and me.”
The threat stood between us. I’m not a violent person by nature; I make friends easily. In the halls of Fort Benning, they taught us that people only have two reactions to a fight: get in or get out. They specialized in teaching people to get in.
As the moment stretched past a heartbeat, I knew that I stood at the threshold of multiple universes and alternate realities.
I had been waiting for this man, for a righteous cause, a reason to rip and tear, to pummel and smash. I’d been waiting for a problem to put my hands on. I would do everything I could, seize every opportunity, and take him to the ground. I would swim up his body the way I’d learned in wrestling, I’d hunt his neck like every jiu-jitsu artist in the infantry had trained me. I would choke him until he was unconscious, and I would crush his skull with a beer keg.
When it was over, I’d sit on the curb and watch the thoughts leak from his body to mix with the rain in the gutter, drinking as many beers as I could before the cops rolled up.
If people think this was to protect corporate profits, they don’t understand how hard it was to get out of bed every morning. They don’t understand how many Saturdays in the park, pushing my kids on a swing, that I missed. They don’t understand the fear an empty fridge can evoke: twenty dollars in your pocket and a tank on E, four days from payday. They don’t understand how much overtime I’ve worked.
I was so tired of having things taken from me.
“Shit, dawg, you’re right.” I pushed the sleeves of my hoodie up to my elbows. “Ain’t nobody here but you and me.”
Words mean things. I didn’t know what he would do. A street fight is unpredictable. All a person can know is the lengths they are willing to go, and I knew that I would beat this man to death before I let him touch a single can of beer.
I was Karma’s bare-knuckled consequence, wishing that a motherfucker would.
He had a heartbeat of calculation; all possible realities spread before him like a deck of cards. Somehow, I think he heard the message. “Alright, man,” he said, and wiped his nose with a skinny, breakable forearm. “I’m gonna dip out.”
I was so heartbroken that I hesitated. I really wanted this catharsis. I needed it. “See you around,” was all I managed to croak as he turned.
I believe in multiple universes and alternate realities. In one of them, a body lies in a pool of blood two blocks away from where I taught children to scratch poetry in sidewalk chalk. In one, it’s his body. In another, it’s mine.
In this one, I sat in my truck and smoked a cigarette, watching in the mirror as he walked west, down Third Avenue towards Rockingham Road.
I missed my sunrise.
~
God has a special place in heaven for the bodega cashier. On Marquette Street, a man named Sanjay opened the doors for me with an ever-present smile. He asked how I was doing, and hoped they weren’t working me too hard. Whenever I finished stocking the cooler, he would wave his hand at me and say, “Take a drink. Anything you like. You work hard.”
I snagged a free orange Monster every delivery. If I ever make a pretty penny, I will buy Sanjay all the beer he can drink. I will fill his pockets with gold.
I was in the beer cooler when I got the email.
My words had become a wildfire that leapt from my mind to someone else’s. And as I read the announcement, I remembered what it felt like to burn with the intensity of a winter’s dream. In a contest with over two thousand entrants, my story, “Five Miles to Epworth,” was chosen.
First Place.
Memories of the previous year blackened in front of my eyes; every hard-fought paycheck, every past-due bill balancing on a razor’s edge, every long day and short night disappeared. This was not a victory over others. This was a triumph over yesterday. I had to read the email three times before I remembered where I was.
I think I whooped. I think I hollered. I think I slapped my palm against the wall thirty times. I know for a fact that I danced, moonwalking in slick boots across a frosted cooler floor. A lifetime of searching for the right combination of words came together in one moment.
I came out wearing my biggest smile. Sanjay, at the counter, asked me, “You okay? I heard you yelling.”
“Just got some good news.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Man, I think everything’s going to be okay.”
“That’s good buddy,” he waved a hand at the cooler wall. “Grab yourself a drink. Whatever you want. You work hard.”
I was the dancing jester of lunatic joy. I was the thunderous drums of blessed victory. I was the blazing sun cresting the edge of the mighty Mississippi. I was the chosen scribe of Hope Eternal, gifted with a pen that bleeds golden ink.
“You still got more work?” Sanjay asked as I walked to the door.
“Shiit, brother,” I called over my shoulder as I stepped out into the warm sunshine beneath a sky of cloudless blue. “I’m just getting started.”
I believe in multiple universes. In one of them, all my words burned away in clouds of smoke under the Rock Island Bridge, just another set of dreams lost on a Thursday morning. In another, I’m stuck at an intersection, unsure of which way to turn, trapped in a neon maze and late for work.
But in this one, my wife spent hours hunting submission calls, not because she believed in my story, but because she believed in me. In this one, I am a professionally published author.
No matter the odds.
No matter how unlikely the story.
Because all it takes is one.
~~~
