The Appaloosa, a story from a collection of Wyoming stories.
REVIEW JACKSON HOLE NEWS
"Whiskey isn't for everyone. Whiskey eating appeals to a smaller group. So, too, the desire for The Whiskey Eaters, a collection of short stories about workers culture in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, may be an acquired taste. Marlena Evangeline's first book, The Whiskey Eaters, may first seem inaccessible. As she tours the bars, restaurants, characters and consciousness of behind-the-blitz Jackson Hole -- drawing from her own lengthy tour of duty in the Wilson underground -- the author shucks convention. Evangeline constructs, spells and punctuates English the way her characters live life. She rides one word into the next, creating a succession of images resembling a Jackson Hole waitress' busy day.
Readers race through stories as if following characters who spin through morning coffee, grab their Croakies on the run for breakfast, squeeze all from a day of untracked powder skiing, rush a cocktail on the way to work, learn the specials, criticize the tips, then close down the Coach in a pre-dawn blur. Along the way they meet a town full of characters -- carpenters, skiers, dealers, anglers, drunks, mothers, vagabonds, who are the muscle of the valley. The ones who make it operate.
And along the way, Evangeline's quirks become irrelevant as her language melds with her subjects' actions. Her tone and style match her subject as if there were no more appropriate method to tell of her community.
The Whiskey Eaters is a quick trip though 25 years of the Wilson Dream, that perfect life we covet at the Rocky Mountain resort. On the way, we brush past the gifted and the garbage, the driven, the drunk and the doomed.
Evangeline's stories range from the dream-like tales to the documentary. Long-time valley residents will recognize several of her protagonists. Others are shrouded, familiar only because of a single trait of idiosyncrasy.
Ultimately, Evangeline is successful in reproducing the fabric of her world. Here, as she waits tables, she ponders the mundane and the philosophical, linking the two in a swirl of thought.
"The sign says if your order isn't up, don't stand in the pass-through and , that if you ignore the sign, there will be consequences to pay. What the sign doesn't know is that I've paid my consequences, paid time and again, and if I hadn't, I wouldn't be standing in the pass-through, waiting for a porterhouse steak, medium rare, garlic potatoes and sauteed vegetables to serve to the hungry middle aged couple in the dinning room, maybe almost my age, maybe older, hard to say , may own body refusing its age, mostly still holding the muscle, an aged prime cut, telling, cut distinct, showing perhaps, in deat, a different kind of hunger. Consequences cannot be managed, arranged like the table setting, forks, knives, plates, but like most managements these dits think they control consequence like some sort of religious consecration as if management were some sort of high f-ing priest of the business world, chanting managese like hail Marys, asking employees to bow to their particular machine like modern pilgrims, smile, bow, consecrate themselves in the money machine."
The Whiskey Eaters is an inside look at a tribe whose history to this point has been only oral. Evangeline has preserved a portion of that heritage.
marlenaevangeline.com
http://www.amazon.com/The-Orange-Blossom-Express-ebook/dp/B004HIM266
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