Streets never really looked as empty as they did during rush hour.  They were full of cars with six empty seats and trunks with a flashlight and an empty two-liter bottle occupying the twenty-nine cubic feet of cargo space that was the selling point of the 1992 Ford Bronco, which thirty thousand people had purchased at twenty percent off over the holidays at Bonham Ford.  The cars were all full of little pine tree air fresheners on ribbons that reeked of artificial winter smell, and old banana peels, and had windows rolled up on a seventy-degree day with the air conditioner and the heating system flaring up alternatively.  Everyone had to be there and no one wanted to be there, except for the retired woman who lived in the apartment one floor above Zeb’s who deliberately went grocery shopping at six o’clock to feel like she was still part of things, the way she was when she was younger, even though she really wasn’t because she stayed in her apartment with all the lights but one turned off, and only ever left to go grocery shopping at six o’clock.

            That’s why Zeb found the marble in the glove compartment.  He didn’t like looking around at the city block full of six thousand tons of steel and a little less than that of concrete and maybe a little more than that of road signs.  He didn’t really have anywhere else to look.  He had already looked through the piles of old sports magazines on the passenger seat that he hadn’t looked through since 1989 when he brought them into his car to make it seem more lived in, even though it was never really living that he did in it.  It was just sitting and staring and occasionally putting his foot down on the pedal to the right of the brake, but not so far to the right that it was the pedal under the clutch.  That was the pedal he had wired to cut the power to the radio because the 1980 Ford F-100 tended to overheat and catch fire if you installed the Icatchi stereo sound system with complementary subwoofer without very detailed knowledge of electrical wiring.

He was looking at the marble because he didn’t really have anything else to look at, and trying to remember why he had put the thing in his glove compartment in the first place, and then he remembered that when he was sixteen and first buying his truck he had been thinking of running away.  He didn’t want to be radical anymore and it was impossible to be mainstream with parents that had named their son Zebulon.  It was impossible to be mainstream with parents that had taught him to play the keyboards, which they did because they said psychedelic music was the way to free your mind and open the door of perception, except that you still had to play the keyboard the way the pages of the green Weisserman’s guide to piano playing told you to or you wouldn’t free your mind the right way, if at all.