The Grand March

      Robert Turner

      THE GRAND MARCH

      Copyright © 2011 Robert Turner. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      isbn 13: 978-1-60899-351-2

      isbn 13: 978-1-4982-7315-2

      Cataloging-in-Publication data:

      Turner, Robert.

      The grand march / Robert Turner.

      isbn 13: 978-1-60899-351-2

      vi + 264 p.; 23 cm.

      1. Road fiction. 2. Drugs—Fiction. 3. Love stories—Fiction. 4. Indiana—Fiction. 5. Illinois—Fiction. I. Title.

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations.

      —Isaiah 61:4

      1

      “These wipers are about useless,” Russell Pinske muttered, partly to himself and partly to see if he could get a response from the woman curled in shadows beside him. She didn’t move. He peered through the bug-spattered windshield into the darkness ahead and wondered, not for the first time, what he was doing with her.

      Onward to the promise of dawn, he steered the speeding car along an unlit country highway. The two-lane route shot straight across flat Indiana farmland, but he had to compensate continually for the car’s tendency to drift left. Dense woods brooded in the moonless night. Fireflies mingled with the Milky Way. The only signal the old AM receiver could pick up was a gospel station broadcasting from a place he’d never heard of. Open windows fanned the stale smell of sun-bleached vinyl car interior. The sleeping woman began to snore again. Gloria Arbogast owned the car.

      They had known one another for a couple of years, but hadn’t spoken in months when they met by chance on the cross-town bus as both were preparing to leave Cincinnati. Russell had sold almost everything he owned and was off to his hometown of Door Prairie before beginning a trek westward. Gloria was going to Toronto to participate in an intensive summer program studying abnormal frogs. She suggested they leave together, an idea that was funny to him. A month ago he was certain he’d never see her again. Now they were on the road in her cranky old Ford Fairlane in the middle of the night.

      He knew the way by heart. The road would curve ahead and enter an uninhabited stretch of dreary marshes that was part of a game preserve. By his reckoning they’d be in town around sunup. The gospel station grew fuzzy. He adjusted the tuning and then switched it off, wondering why they couldn’t pick up any of the stations out of Chicago. The glow of the city should soon be visible, a purple-orange aura on the western horizon. Rank marsh water perfumed the humid air. Gloria sighed and shifted her position, throwing one arm over the edge of the seat. The car roared on.

      A large moth hit the glass with an audible splat. He’d long since depleted the car’s reservoir of wiper fluid, and was sickened by the dry blades merely smearing the gummy remains into the mélange that had been accumulating for hours. Not that there was much to see in this swampland, nothing but a scum-ridden slurry of shallow streams. He eased off the accelerator, mindful that some bored state trooper might be out hunting for a fool like himself. Something about the thought of being stopped by a cop made him need to urinate, so he pulled off the road near a bridge that crossed the Kankakee River. After finding relief on its banks he returned to the car for a cup, intending to fetch some water and wash the windshield. Gloria awoke as he rummaged through his pack in the back seat.

      “What are you doing?” she asked with a drooping mouth, her head propped on the window. Her voice startled him.

      “Sorry,” he mumbled, struggling with a strap on a compartment of his pack. “I’m going to clean the windshield. I can’t stand looking at bug guts anymore.”

      He grabbed a cup and a rag.

      “I used up all your fluid, there wasn’t much left,” he said, backing out of the car. He leaned into the front seat to tell her, “Man, you need new wipers.”

      She looked at him placidly and shut her eyes. He left the door open and went back to the river. She reached over and closed it, then stretched out on the bench seat.

      “Hey, can you turn the light on?” he called out upon his return. She lifted a weary hand and flipped the switch. He cleaned the glass and the wipers, then stashed his gear and started the motor. They rolled back onto the road and got up to speed.

      “Car’s pulling to the left pretty bad. Could be your front end.”

      She grunted. He looked at her and continued.

      “Hope it makes it to Detroit.”

      “I’m going to Toronto,” she said with a sigh, her head resting on her hands and her eyes tightly closed.

      “Yeah, well, I’m saying I hope it makes it to Detroit.”

      She yawned and buried her face in her arms.

      A hint of light touched the eastern sky. They approached a town that greeted its visitors with large stone markers mounted with rusted ship anchors. Whenever he came through here, he wondered what significance these anchors held for this landlocked farming community. He’d never bothered to find out, but now thought that his open-road adventure ought to include learning about places like this. He stopped at the next junction. The route they were on went through the lake counties and into Chicago. He turned north. Straight ahead lay Door Prairie, and Michigan beyond. Stars faded in the blushing dawn. The moist air was strangely sweet.

      He looked at her in the light from the dashboard. Her face wore an unguarded expression, one he saw as stern, even dour. Together they had formed a relationship of convenience. He valued their conversations, and the witty acuity she brought to them. She found in him a quality of canine fidelity. He was attentive and loyal and she thrived on that companionship, not having many close friends in her life. At one time she tried to buy into his laid-back lifestyle, but couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for it. He was a line cook, without any apparent desire to advance beyond that. Whatever ambition he had came in fits and starts, and seemed to her to be misplaced anyway. She was a serious person, now beginning graduate work in the field of environmental science, specializing in wetlands ecology.

      Problems arose when they tried to move beyond using each other, when they sought to forge a stable platform for their disjointed lives. That platform collapsed last winter, after many creaks and groans, when it became apparent that he had some idealized notions of their romance that she did not share. She wouldn’t even call what they had a romance, and scoffed at his sentimental earnestness, hoping to snap him out of it. But when he continued to lay bare his innermost soul, she hardened against what she considered to be his gratuitous sincerity. The depth of his feeling unnerved her. She simply had never felt swept off her feet, certainly not in the way he claimed to have been. He accused her of indifference, which she refused to dispute. When he began insisting that she start caring about him, it was clear they were done. Done for good, he had thought, yet here they were.

      After their breakup Russell began to spend more time with people