Kate Calhoun broke the news when she came by to clean the other day. At first, she teased me with what my father always called “woman talk, who was dating who, who was sneaking off with who, that kind of thing. I sat in my easy chair in the living room and read the paper, nodding and grunting responses, the way I had when Muriel used to run her gob. But suddenly, she sucker punched me with something that hit deep.

“They’re closin’ up Chad Riley’s bar,” she announced.

Down came the paper, and I peered over my shoulder at her while she dusted off the living room lampshades. “What now?”

“Heard it from Dan Riley hisself!” she declared, as if I had dared contradict her. “They’re closin’ her up. Gonna sell it to some outfit from outta town.”

There was more, but I didn’t bother listening. My mind drifted immediately elsewhere, back to better days when I was a younger man. I sat there long after Kate had left and let the memories come flooding in like the tide. I could taste the cold draft beer, hear them pool balls clacking like cassinettes, and smell the mix of smoke, whiskey, and Chad Riley’s English Leather cologne that had always hung in the air around the bar.

And suddenly, I was there on the stool, which was my stool, at the corner of the bar which was my corner, and Dusty was there at my elbow like a ghost. I could even hear the boys, all the boys, from Johnny King to Nick Little, from Willy Cashum to Pete Bigelow, they were all there, laughing and drinking draft and talking about girls, trucks, anything and everything. Chad Riley’s, a lynchpin of my existence that had stood for five decades, and which I had taken for granted would stand for ten more.

I’ve lived in south Texas my whole life, in the same town where I and Muriel raised a family. I grew up on daddy’s farm, which I inherited when he retired. We had Bobby here, and I kept the place up after he moved and Muriel died. And all that time, nearly twenty-five years, there was a Chad Riley’s to serve as my second home. I was thirty when Chad opened it (he come down from Vegas, where he used to be a bar tender at one of them Caesar’s Palace-type outfits) and it had become as much a part of me as my fingers and toes.

Though I was sitting down, I could feel myself floating out of the chair and into the air, like one of them Astroturf projections that I heard about on TV. I was walking through the front door of Chad’s, into the dark wood interior with the tables all in one corner, the bar on the right by the jukebox, and two pool tables taking up the rest of the place with a little hallway that went to the bathrooms. Over the bar hung a wall-to-wall neon silhouette of a sexy lady showing some leg, which Muriel had once petitioned to have taken down to no avail. When you came into Chad’s, you felt like you were coming home, like the whole place always had its arms open, ready to embrace you.

Hearing about the bar being closed, I felt the way you would if somebody you loved had finally died of cancer. Watching them slog through life in pain was more burden than the thought of them dying, and you felt free when they finally kicked the big one. I had felt that way when Muriel passed, and I felt that way when I heard Chad Riley’s kids had finally decided it was time to end their father’s legacy.

The cancer that killed Chad’s, of course, was The Chopping Night. Nothing was ever the same after that, and those memories tainted the bar forever. Chad Riley retired a year after all that hullabaloo and his kids tried to keep the doors open, but the boys all gradually left off coming. Me and Dusty started hanging out at Rudy’s pub instead, and though we talked about going in to say hi to Dan Riley from time to time, we never did. We couldn’t.

Part of it was the men in suits, who showed up and started making life difficult. This is south Texas: nobody wears a suit, not even on Sundays. But after the Chopping Night, almost every day, two or three preppy fellas in two-piece business suits would troop in and hang around asking questions about Carl Bannon. They was like Joe Friday from that cop show, and made a habit of pestering everybody in the bar. Funny thing, even though Chad normally took absolutely no shit from anybody, he wouldn’t even look those button-up Bills in the eye. Willy and Pete petitioned him to have those suit guys barred several times, but Chad wouldn’t even give them a straight answer. It was clear as day he was scared of’em, and Chad Riley wasn’t scared of nobody except Marv McMurphy, who got the needle after he carried out one of the most brutal crimes in Texas history.

Oh, there’s books about the Chopping Night and true crime podcasts and even an episode of one of them crime report shows that Muriel used to watch. Over the years, I’ve talked to journalists and writers and even a couple of young people who blew into town to make a YouTube video about it. I told them the same balooey I’ve told everybody, the basic rundown that leaves out everything that actually happened. What me and Dusty and Chad Riley saw ain’t something you can tell folks. It ain’t’ something you can even admit to yourself, because it implies a universe that’s far too wide and far too deep to be comfortable in.

It’s been enough years, I guess, and everybody involved except me is dead. I’m eighty now, and I ain’t got much longer left. So, it’s as good a time as any. You won’t believe me, and I wouldn’t expect you to. When Muriel, God rest her, asked me about it I just changed the subject. Maybe it was them suit guys, and maybe it was just the idea of being sent to the funny farm, but I didn’t want to talk about the Chopping Night. But I saw what I saw, and I’ll go to my grave with that night floating in my memories.

The first thing I reckon you got to understand is what kind of man Marv McMurphy was, even before the Chopping Night. To sum it up: he was an ugly guy married to a beautiful woman. Loretta McMurphy was as gorgeous as a dream, and nobody could blame Marv for being jealous. But suspicion worked on Marv like one of them cocaine speedballs, making him powerful gungy whenever another man was within a hundred feet of his baby girl. When he came into Chad’s on Friday and Saturday nights, you had better not give his lady a look if she were with him. I had seen Marv lay one or two of the boys out on the floor for making eyes at Loretta and he beat Pete Bigelow half to death for giving Loretta a whistle. The sheriff had threatened him and Chad had talked of barring him, but Marv was a dangerous guy to cross and everybody in town knew it.

Poor Loretta. For a pretty woman, she never seemed to have no fun. I reckon she was about twenty-five then, but you could tell three childless years with Marv was aging her prematurely. I saw lines forming around her mouth and eyes, her skin folding under the pressure of being shackled to that crazy fool. Why she married him I can’t figure, but he had a miser’s love for her affection.

The other thing you got to understand is Carl Bannon. He was twenty-something, but what he did in the two decades before he wandered into town will forever be a mystery. He was a drifter who just blew in one day and was a quiet kind’a fellow who never talked much. The town was always small, and everybody knew everybody, so an out-and-out stranger like Carl stood out like a sore thumb. My best friend, Dusty Stalburg, said he just showed up in his office at the garage one day, hands in his pockets, looking kinda lost. He was dressed in faded denim with long, tangled blonde hair and a fidgety look to him.

“What you need, boy?” Dusty asked.

“Lookin’ for a job.”

“What makes you think I need anybody, son?”

The kid swallowed. “I’m good with my hands. I can show you.”