He'd be dead in two months eating the slop they did. All that people seemed to eat here was grease and more grease. You couldn't even find a bowl of lettuce in this town. He lived right outside of Philadelphia, and he thought that if he ever had to live in a place like Meade, Ohio, he'd go ahead and shoot himself. Leaning back in his seat, the bus driver pulled his leather cap down over his eyes. You could see it for miles, puffing like a volcano about to blow its skinny top. The smokestack across town, by far the tallest structure in this part of the state, belched forth another dirty brown cloud. He yawned and took a swig from a bottle of pink medicine he kept on the dashboard. He wished he could have a cup of coffee, but his ulcer was acting up again. The bus driver, a soft, sawed-off man who wore elevated shoes and a limp bow tie, pulled in the alley beside the depot and announced a forty-minute break. Strangers complained about the stench, but the locals liked to brag that it was the sweet smell of money. The Greyhound made its regular stop in Meade, Ohio, a little paper-mill town an hour south of Columbus that smelled like rotten eggs. It was a Wednesday afternoon in the fall of 1945, not long after the war had ended.
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