Gambling Stories

  Alexandria, a small, nondescript city on the Red River in central Louisiana, is the symbolic checkpoint separating the state’s French, Catholic south from its Scots-Irish, Protestant north. In the pre-interstate days, a two-lane highway weaved its way south from town toward Baton Rouge. A picturesque, tree-lined bayou flanked one side of the road. On the other side were pastures and a string of whitewashed cabins which...

By mid-afternoon it was snowing, one of those early spring one-last-time sucker- punch squalls, and as the sun went down, and the streetlights came on the temperature rose a couple degrees and the snow began to mix with freezing rain. This would have been around the rush hour. There were only five people in the Tip Top, two of them playing pool and requiring quarters, but the rest just sitting there, so the bartender had...