A SHORT ESSAY ON UTOPIANISM.

Ruby was standing outside the trailer yelling at Ronnie. They had been having lots of fights over Ronnie not getting a regular job and Ruby finally told him to pack up and get out. It was Ruby's trailer that she'd bought for $1500 and moved into a park where, in Paris, Texas, the rate was $50 a week.

Ruby shouted at Ronnie as he threw his life possessions into the back of his multi-colored ten year old Chevy pickup truck with the maroon camper shell. 

"Ronnie, I can't live like this no more. We was trying to save money to get out of this hell hole but all you do is lay around all day like this was some kind of a utopia. This, ain't no utopia, Ronnie, this is just shit. I can do better on my own."

Ronnie's skinny short body began to jerk and he swayed on the tips of his cowboy boots. He felt like punching someone or putting his fist through a wall. Instead he walked back to his truck, threw a sleeping bag and some jeans into the camper , then a Fender guitar he'd picked up at a garage sale the day before. 

Driving out of the park Ronnie couldn't look at Ruby but he glanced back at Bugle, Ruby's red bone hound, tied to a ratty post oak tree next to the trailer. Bugle stood there like his world was coming to an end, not even howling. The dog had sensed that this fight was different, that he'd never see Ronnie again. He sat on his haunches looking after the Chevy and began making plans for a life alone with Ruby. Bugle and Ronnie had gone out to shoot dove a few times and it had been fun but Bugle wasn't really a bird dog and so they didn't do very well. 

Ronnie had about $300 he'd held back for just such an occasion and that would be enough  money to get him to Colorado. He drove for twenty hours straight, just stopping for gas. The guitar was strapped into the passenger seat and he reached over once in a while to snap a string. Talk radio went on all night and kept him awake. They were going on about mandates and it reminded him of Ruby's bad habit of using big words, like utopia. what ever the hell that was. But Ronnie figured out what a mandate was, which was when big government came in and made you do something you didn't want to do and fined you if you didn't do it.

As Ronnie crossed the New Mexico line he was forgetting all about Ruby and her big words and how she always acted like she was better than everyone else. He'd show her. He knew a town in Colorado where he could park his camper for $8 a night. There was a shop nearby which made pull-trailers and he could get a welding job there and be paid under the table. He would save up, get his own place, find a good dog and go hunting. 

Ronnie envisioned his own perfect setup away from Ruby and her big ideas. And he made a pact with himself never to give big government any mandate money. "Big government ain't going to get their hands on my money" he thought to himself as he pulled up and parked in front of a breakfast joint. He was going to ask one of the waitresses if she knew what the word utopia meant.

The following year Ronnie was back in Paris trying to find Ruby. She'd moved out of the park but the lady would not give him any information. It took him three days to find her, at Chile's, her favorite place to go Friday nights. He sat way at the end of the horse shoe bar hidden behind a cash register and watched Ruby as she ate fish sticks. She was with a man he didn't recognize. 

Half way through dinner the man got up and visited the men's room, walking right behind where Ronnie was sitting at the bar. He was taller than Ronnie and was wearing bleached jeans with creases down the front. 

Ronnie slipped outside and waited in his truck until Ruby and the man came out, then followed them back to a small house in a development near the Army base. He came back the next morning and saw the man leave, after which he pulled into the driveway, got out of his truck and knocked on the door.

Ruby opened the door a crack and when she saw Ronnie she yelled at him to get off her property. 

Ronnie was telling her how he'd changed, he wanted another chance and he wasn't in a hurry, he'd be around town for a while.

Ruby screamed at him. "Ronnie, just get out of my driveway and don't ever come back here. I have a life and we got an option on this place. We both got jobs and are savin' the down payment. I got what I want, Ronnie, what I always wanted. Now get out of here and don't ever follow me. Bugle got hit by a Semi and you might just as well have. You're a loser, Ronnie."

Ronnie walked back to his truck without causing any more ruckus but something had clicked in his mind. In all of his fights with Ruby he had never felt this angry. Not only had she been careless with Bugle but she was out to destroy his way of life. 

"Nobody's ever gonna call me a loser and get away with it", he thought to himself, "I may be a lot of bad things, but I'm not a Goddamned loser, cause I got my own dreams."

Several weeks later Ronnie had their pattern figured out. Every Friday night after work Ruby and the man would leave the house about six, drive down to the route Rt.82 bypass on their way to Chile's. She drove the old Honda. There was construction---with Cat bulldozers and dump trucks parked overnight on the shoulder of a stretch of torn up highway about a hundred yards long. 

On this night Ronnie's timing couldn't have been better. He sped his pickup alongside the Honda and forced it head on into a dump truck still loaded with twenty tons of gravel.The Honda skidded along the line of heavy equipment and then rolled over twice. "I guess that ain't no utopia, is it Ruby" he shouted out the window.

Ronnie laughed uncontrollably for several hours as he headed West in his Chevy, knocking back beers as he went. He gassed up at Denton and headed for Lubbock on Rt. 82. He felt high, not giddy like from whiskey, but light headed. This time he was going all the way to Alaska. A man like him could really live in the wild up there. Build a cabin, live on fresh salmon and deer meat. He'd heard from a guy in the truck stop that there were good welding jobs on the pipelines. He would need to get certified. 

A trooper's flashers and siren came on right behind his truck. "Shit", he thought to himself, "they're pullin' me over for speedin'." Ronnie couldn't have known then that the man had died instantly when the side of the Honda was crushed but Ruby had survived the wreck.

On the night of his scheduled execution Ronnie sat on the edge of his bunk at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. The state no longer provided last meals but Pastor had been allowed to bring Ronnie a pancake special from IHOP. As Pastor read from the Bible, Ronnie ate slowly, stirring the syrup into the loose scrambled eggs. He ate each bite with intensity, his breathing coming in short little gasps.

When Ronnie had finished his pancakes, Pastor got down on his knees in front of the bunk.

"Ronnie Whitelaw, do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?"

"Yes, I think I will" Ronnie said.

As Ronnie was strapped to the gurney and catheters inserted into his arms he tried to think of Bugle and their early morning trips out to the hay fields east of Paris to shoot dove. That was the best part of my life he kept repeating over and over in his mind. 

The injections felt like a double shot of Beam flooding down the length of his body. For the first time in his brief existence Ronnie was getting a fair shot at Utopia.