Chapter One The Coffee Drinkers In the small hours of the day, when town is so still as to seem sus- pended behind glass, Ralph Boyce pulls his white Ford pickup to a stop in front of the Utopia General Store. He turns off his engine and sits alone in the darkness outside the colorless brick front, facing the taped notices of deaths and funerals on the glass door. Ralph has been the first person to arrive at the store, probably the first in Utopia to rise out of bed, for over half a century, and he plans on continuing to swing the first set of headlights onto Main Street for the rest of his days. He wakes up without an alarm, feeds his dog, Fudge, and leaves the house by 5:10 or 5:11, depending on when the weather report ends. Ralph is seventy-six years old and he ran the store for thirty-seven years. He retired over a decade ago and doesn't quite know why he keeps showing up before the store even opens. He figures it probably has something to do with tradition. While he waits, Ralph listens to country standards on the AM radio station. If the air outside is mild, he'll lean against his truck and look down the length of his quiet town, feigning patience. It's a strange thing when a man finds himself locked out of his former place of business. Soon enough a few more old-timers lurch their trucks alongside his, their dust-blasted Chevrolets and Fords and GMCs lining up against one another like cattle in a pen on the unpaved stretch out front of the store. If one of the men's trucks is ever parked in a different order, or even at a different angle, someone will ask him if he's feeling unwell, or if there's trouble at home. The men nod at one another and clear their throats, trickle out a few words on the weather. Around 5:30, the forty-five-year-old owner, Morris, who started working for Ralph at the store when he was a high school sophomore and who now has a son of his own in his sophomore year, pulls up. He unlocks the back door, switching on the blinkering lights, before trudging up the center aisle to the front, where the old-timers wait like cats eager to be let inside after a long night. "Evenin', Morris," they say, giving the younger man a hard time about sleeping in, as he takes his place behind the register with a tired sigh. When Ralph owned the store he got to work at 4:30, so as far as he's concerned, Morris should count himself rested. But Morris is groggy and likes to wake up in peace, so he lingers up front, sipping from a giant styrofoam cup of water. His register faces a Blue Bell ice cream cooler, above which hang two wooden shelves covered in deer pelts, crowded with pouches of beef jerky and about a dozen mass market paperback thrillers. In a little while some younger men of Utopia will cluster around the register and share stories of dirt and intrigue as they buy their gallons of iced tea and the paper-wrapped slabs of steak they'll cook up for lunch over propane grills on their job sites. The old-timers, chapped hands shoved in jeans pockets, walk barrel- legged toward the coffeepots in the back by the meat market, boots creaking all the way. Tony Clark, a ranch manager in an old RFD-TV cap, the cloudy outline of a can of snuff pressed into his left shirt pocket, always makes the first pot of coffee while Sid, whose sons and grandson now run the lumberyard he once owned, Albert, a contractor who built Ralph's house, Hose, a rancher and former professional rodeo circuit rider, and John, the school superintendent, bunch together on a plank bench, careful that their legs don't touch. The town welder, John Hillis, who can trace his family's roots all the way back to Utopia's founder, Colonel William Ware, floats between the cash register and the coffeepots, a toothpick settled comfortably in his amused grin. The coffee drinkers range in age from those who served in Vietnam an Excerpted from Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town by Karen Valby All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
