THE STICK GAME by Peter Bowen

When I was trying to move back to Montana in 1999 and looking for a cheap house, I stopped in Choteau at the real estate office. “Have you got a house for $30,000?” I asked and explained, “I’m retiring to write and won’t have much money.”

They looked down their noses at me. “We ALREADY have a writer-in-residence,” they informed me as though there is some system that allots one writer per Montana town. (Maybe there OUGHT to be.) I thought they’d claim A.B. Guthrie, Jr, whose roots go deep in Choteau -- his dad was the superintendent of schools there and a kind of lay humanist minister. But they said Peter Bowen, clearly believing that the fictional town of Toussaint is really Choteau. They got their comeuppance when Bowen left to follow a Creole woman to New Orleans, or so I heard. Nobody pins down Peter Bowen. But a lot of people are interested in his “doin’s.”

Not least among them is John Holt, who is another of the Montana writers, at the Livingston end (as opposed to the Missoula Lariati who would be hard-pressed to do any kind of manual labor, except for the women, often ranch-raised). In fact, Holt is enough of a wild man to take on both Bowen (for writing too fast -- ten days to create a book -- and not fact-checking) and his publisher, St. Martins, for not paying well enough to support Bowen to write slowly and visit the terrain in question. This prompted a slap-down from someone named Jon Thompson who felt that if Bowen wants to go out and get screwed in the less-happy sense, he’s entitled. (http://calitreview.com/168)

Most of the reviews make much of the location of the Du Pre series in northern Montana, like Choteau, but they forget that these books are genre, that is, they are stylized and play out the same elements over and over in slightly different patterns. Du Pre is Metis, that blend of two cultures and genomes created when the Hudson’s Bay Company and others sent a wave of European men in the fur trade all over northern North America where they found autochthonous wives and founded a new country, the Red River people, which was crushed by Canada, sending many of them across the border to Montana. The Metis, often mislabeled “Cree,” are all over the place where I am (Valier, a little east and north of Choteau). They are a vigorous, funny, and colorful people weeded out by hardship and bouyed up by music. Holt complains that they don’t talk the way Bowen has them speaking -- replacing most prepositions with commas -- but who cares? Good genre creates a world of its own.

However, I quite agree with Holt that the series is uneven -- one book might be terrific and another book must have been written while drunk and in a very bad mood. “The Stick Game” is one of the terrific ones. It is spare, fast, coherent, and explores the trope of stick game, gambling, in a way not so obvious as to prevent reflection. Stick Game, AKA Hand Game or Bone Game, is one of the most ancient of gambling games. (I love to cite the finding of a set of the necessary “bones” in a cave off eastern Africa thousands of years before history began.) And yet it’s no more than “button, button, who’s got the button.”

In this particular search for the “button,” the culprit is a mining company intent on chewing up the Sweetgrass Hills and putting it through the heap leach process to extract the last bit of gold in that volcanic extrusion. This poisons everything, but in a geologically subtle way, hidden from those who can’t read the clues. Simple plot, deadly wrongs to right, and lots of vivid local color.

Why do we love Du Pre so much? Why do we begin to think of him as a real person and demand that he respond to reality? The man drinks while driving, smokes constantly, is able to perform feats of love at an advanced age, plays violin with sublime results, and has a Medicine Man buddy who turns into a coyote and claims to have lived back when -- well, when the Africans played the Hand Game in a cave on the east coast of Africa. Is it the old love of the mystical and the superhero like Beowulf? Yup. I suppose.

What’s harder to answer is why people come here about this time of year (they don’t like cold) thinking that they will find the real Du Pre and actual places for which these genre novels will provide a road map and etiquette guide. Two characters in this book are a pair of docs, one a vet and one an MD, who regularly beat the tar out of each other and otherwise try to kill each other, but who also join in common cause to prevent injustice. Is that real? (Not that Rib Gustafson might not pretend it was!) All the books have a repeat character who is such a jillionaire that he can pick up the tab for any loose ends without Bowen having to find some other explanation. Only a fool or a youngster would believe the world is really like that. But then some computer millionaire comes out here and funds an aggressive anti-meth campaign -- is that because he reads Peter Bowen books? Can fiction cause reality? Sometimes. They converse.

I’ve never met Bowen and no one would mistake me for any of his characters. I know that 90% of what he claims is exaggeration, but the other 10% (maybe more) is quite true. Most of the crimes are ripped from the headlines. We know Persephone mining is really Pegasus. I testified myself at the hearings to prevent the grinding up of the Sweetgrass Hills which I can see from here.

I’ve also come smack up against the publishing inequities that abound in this country, funneling proceeds into the pockets of back-east shadow people while the Montana writers are out here in a hard land, scraping by with the help of friends. Why accuse Holt for pointing that out? Wouldn’t Du Pre do the same? Why isn’t there a publisher out here where they could check some facts by looking out the window?