The Gambler
A Story
by Morgan TaltyThe first time I drove a car, I was with my father. I can’t remember what car I drove. My father didn’t even own one; he was notorious for crashing his vehicles, and the state eventually took his license away.
I was eleven. Or maybe twelve. It was summer, and I was visiting him, as I always did during those green-bloomed and hot months in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when my mother let him see me on his terms. To get to Bridgeport, my mother usually sent me down on a Greyhound bus from downtown Bangor, Maine, and she always complained how Greyhound shouldn’t be so far from the Penobscot Nation, that there should be one right off the reservation in Old Town. But there wasn’t one, and there never would be. The only bus terminal was in downtown, right out back of a bar that like the station itself no longer exists.