Tyon, Texas is ninety minutes southwest of Austin. You take the highway for about half the trip, and the rest is through backroads and farm-to-markets. The roads are lined with cows, horses, and some goats, and at nighttime the only substantial source of light is the odd oil refinery a mile or so off the road. For this reason, it’s suggested that travelers either stay the night or plan to get into town early enough to enjoy all that it has to offer and leave before it gets dark.

These offerings are slight, but unique enough to make the trip worth it. There’s a country music venue that once hosted major touring acts but has, for the last two decades, been populated by local unknowns. There’s a brewery, one of the state’s oldest, that produces only one beer–a lager that adheres to no particular style or even to a consistent recipe–which is not distributed outside of town limits. Tyon is also the site of a large pond, notable for being the only non-migratory habitat for the common loon within landlocked Texas.

She drove. He sat in the passenger seat, looking for a new song to put on.

“So you can’t get the beer anywhere else?” she asked, involuntarily leaning to the right as a pickup carrying an empty livestock trailer passed a little too closely.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Maybe at some convenience stores or something close to town. Actually, I don’t know if they even bottle it.”

“Is it supposed to be good?”

“Yeah. I think it’s supposed to be really good.” Another trailer appeared, this one slower and more solidly situated within the confines of its own lane. A flea-bitten horse made mournful eye contact with them. They both waved at it.

“One thing I will say for Texas,” she said, “is that you get to see a lot of animals.”

“My parents’ neighbors have horses,” he said. “They don’t drive them around, though.”

“That’s because people in Texas are psycho.”

“I think there are just more farmers here than in Massachusetts.”

“Farmers are psycho,” she said. “My dad was a farmer and he’s a psycho.”

He pointed to the stuffed toy tied to her rearview mirror, a monkey in the shape of a donut bearing a wavy ring of pink frosting covered in rainbow sprinkles. He turned it around, angling toward her the inexplicable little stitched black X denoting the monkey’s anus.

She laughed. “He’s a psycho,” she said.

“Is he a farmer?”

“Yes. He farms donuts.” He laughed and put a hand on her knee. She held it for a second before taking her hand back to correct the car, which had begun drifting to the left.

“But yeah,” he continued. “The beer. It’s supposed to be really good. It isn’t a specific type of beer or anything, like it isn’t a pilsner or a pale ale or anything else. I guess they don’t always use the same malts, so the color and the taste change, even though they sell it all as the same beer. But everyone who I saw talking about it online said it was good, even if what they had was different.”

“That’s interesting,” she said. “I’m excited to try it.”

She had to stop suddenly as a traffic light materialized in the distance, barely flashing yellow before switching to red. The car pulled forward in what felt like slow-motion and then rattled its way back into position. She threw a protective arm over his chest.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so,” he said. “It’s insane that they put traffic lights on a road where the speed limit is 65.”

“Texas is stupid,” she said. He nodded noncommittally.

The little blue arrow on the map on her phone drifted past the crooked matching line that angled off to the right, which was immediately replaced by a chaotic blue squiggle trying to get them back on course.

“Oh, shit,” she said,” I think I missed it.”

“There wasn’t a sign or anything,” he said. The road looked like a dead end to him.

“Well. We have time, at least.” She checked the phone. “It only added five minutes. See, we can u-turn up there.”

They took a left into a convenient median and waited for the eastbound traffic to slow. They watched a shiny black Dodge pickup overtake a small, tan sedan, close enough that, were the two cars’ mirrors level, they would have clipped.

“Jesus,” she said. “I hate Texas drivers.”

“They’re stupid,” he agreed.

“When we were in Massachusetts, no one was driving like that. Even when I was in the fast lane, people weren’t tailing me.”

“That is not a common Massachusetts experience,” he said. “But you’re right. They’re not this dumb.”

“I think Texas just makes people stupid.” She found a gap and got up to speed as quickly as her hatchback would allow. “It’s a uniquely asinine state.” She said it without anger, as someone might state a fact.

“Maybe,” he said. “But look at that.” Cows, at least twenty of them—several black ones, a few with the classic black-and-white sports, and two or three russet-colored longhorns—grazed in a field beneath the peaking afternoon sun. The matrix of sunlight trapped between the blades of glass made a fuzzy halo across the entire field, the grass glowing the neon-lime of astroturf but moving with perfectly natural non-uniformity in the breeze. Two of the black cows stood motionless underneath one of the few trees, and, further back, several more drank from a small pond. The pond flatly reflected the sky with no glare as though someone had cut an oblong circle out of the grass to reveal a second sky below. A calf took a few hesitant steps and, already tired, lay down at its mother’s legs.

“True,” she said. “That part is good”

***

Ten minutes later, they were back at the same median.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “We were supposed to take that exit, right? That was the one on the map.”

“I think so,” he said. Traffic had already started to build up, cars moving at a barely slower pace, gaps appearing in the right lane and closing before she could slide into them.

“Did you see anywhere else? Maybe we missed another turn. My signal isn’t very good here.”

“I didn’t see any,” he said. “It just brought us right back onto the road.”

“Right? It must think we’re somewhere else.” She inched forward, hopefully eyeing a gap which a white SUV sped up to deny her. “Hey, Siri,” she said, her tone serious and authoritative. “You stupid bitch. Tell us where we are.”

“I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?” The telephone answered.

“Be nice to her,” he said.

“She’s my slut. She does what I say.”

“Say, ‘Siri, I’ll suck you off if you tell me where we are.’”

“Siri, I’ll suck your titties. You slut.”

He angled the monkey at her again. “You suck his titties.”

“No, you do.” Another gap opened. After a second’s hesitation, she took it.

They pulled over at a gas station near the field to check the directions. Most of the cows were obscured by the slight slope of the landscape, but a couple were visible in the distance. One was eating grass, the other sleeping.

“It’s T-Y-O-N,” she said, “right?”

“Right,” he said, checking his phone again as though he had reason to doubt himself.

“Maybe we should put in a specific place. What’s the name of the lake?”

“I don’t think it has one,” he said. “I looked up ‘Tyon loon lake’ a bunch and it just said that there’s ‘a lake’ with loons. None of them gave the name.”

“The internet is annoying,” she said.

“I hate when it won’t tell me what I want it to tell me.”

“What about the brewery? Is it just ‘Tyon Brewery’?”

“I think so,” he said. “Let me check.” He typed a few letters into his phone and waited for the results to load. He decided that they were taking too long and started to shake his phone in mock anger.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Give it a second. We have all day.”

“I’m going to throw it out the window,” he said, his voice not yet calm enough to pass off the remark as a joke.

“Then the cows will take it. They’ll doxx you.”

“They should post udder.”

“They’ll email all your students and it’ll just say ‘mooo.’”

“I don’t think they’d notice the difference,” he said. His tone was lighter now. The page finished loading, and he tilted his phone toward her. She typed in “Tyon Brewery” and the map set them a new course.

***

They sat idling in a little divot in the woods next to the dirt road and stared at the faint dot on the map. It was labeled “Tyon Brewery” and supposedly lay only a few hundred yards to their right, but with no visible inroads and the rows of ash and cedar blocking their view the destination seemed impossibly distant. Though it was partially the effect of the thick layers of trees, the sky had definitely darkened a little.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Are we supposed to hike there?”

“Maybe the actual brewery isn’t open to the public,” he said. “I just assumed that you drink it there. But maybe you’re supposed to go to a bar or something.”

“People still work there, though.” She zoomed her map out, looking for the faintest line describing a way into the place, but soon the display showed all of Texas, and then all of the United States. She put it down, frustrated.

“I’m annoyed,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m annoyed at the stupid map for not telling us how to get there, or the stupid town for being impossible to get to.”

“We should just put something else in there,” he said. “A bar or something. Since we probably can’t go to the brewery anyway.”

“Shouldn’t we go to the pond first?” she asked. “While it’s still light out?”

“Yeah. We can ask someone how to get there, though.”

“Tyon bars” wasn’t turning anything up. The search had autocorrected to “Tyler bars,” and was listing the customer ratings of several sports bars and pool halls four hours away. He revised the search to “bars near me,” and all that came up were a few sit-down restaurants in nearby towns, none in Tyon.

A car honked at them on its way past, swerving to the left. “Maybe we should find somewhere else to park,” she said. She eased the car out of the ditch and they continued through the woods. The brewery disappeared from her map after a couple of minutes.

After a mile they took another right and continued down an unmarked road, even narrower than the last, then pulled off to the side.

“Look,” she said, surprised. “Don’t those look like the same cows?”

She pointed out of her window to a field almost identical, to the best of their recollections, to the one they had waited by earlier. The same sparse trees, the same distribution of differently-colored cattle, and the same pond. The afternoon sunlight now glared off of the water, and it no longer looked flat but, instead, troubled, as though the harsh stripes of sunlight were instead roiling waves, suspended in space just before breaking. The calf had wandered off from its mother and was now taking small bites of grass on shaky legs.

“Oh, weird,” he said. “The pond looks the same too. I guess a lot of farmland just looks the same.”

“Or it’s aliens,” she said.

“Maybe it’s aliens.”

He tried to lay his head on her shoulder, but the center console forced him to bend his body into an unnatural C-shape to do so. She stroked his head anyways.

“Are you tired?” she asked.

“A little,” he said.” He was looking at the cows. They were closer than they had been on the highway. The one under the tree seemed like it was looking at them, its huge eyes empty and innocent.

“Me too.”

“We could go home,” he said. “Just take the L. We saw some cows, at least.”

“But how will you try your beer? And see your loons?” She sounded concerned.

“I’ll be okay,” he said, putting his hand on her knee again.

“Let’s try one more time,” she said. “I’ll just put ‘Tyon’ in again. Maybe it’ll tell us a different way.”

The map loaded in about thirty seconds. They reversed away from the field and drove back onto the wooded road.

***

“I’m getting kind of pissed off,” she said. There was no anger in her voice; it was as if she was objectively observing the emotions of another rather than herself. “I don’t see why it should be so difficult to find a stupid fucking town.”

“We should probably head back,” he said. “It isn’t worth it.”

The map had taken them on a circuitous root out of the woods, back onto the highway, and back into the woods before telling them that they’d arrived at their destination. They couldn’t tell if where they were stopped was somewhere they’d already been. The sun was definitely setting, and it was getting harder to pick out distinguishing features from the landscape. The trees were almost a solid black cloud.

“What makes me most mad is that I can’t get mad at anyone specific,” he said. “Like, it’s no one’s fault. There’s a town, and there’s the map, and there’s us, and we’re all doing what we’re supposed to be doing, but the three things can’t work together, for whatever reason. I can’t even get mad at us. Myself.”

“We should sue Google,” she said. “Or Texas.”

“The city of Tyon,” he said. “Town. Whatever.”

“I hate being in places like this at night,” she said. The comblike foliage of the cedar elms looked like serrations ground into the dark sky. “I get paranoid that it’s a sundown town.”

“Do those still exist?” he asked.

“When my dad first moved to Georgia, he had to stay out of the town next to his because that’s where all the Klan were.”

“Jesus,” he said. “At least we’re not in an actual town.”

“That’s true,” she said. “It’s probably only farmers who live out here.”

“Psycho farmers,” he said.

Both were temporarily blinded as, somewhere to their right, a bright light switched on with a mechanical clank followed by the hum of electricity.

She yelled, briefly, and he, suddenly angry, shouted “What the fuck.” They rubbed their eyes, trying to clear the bright purple bruises from their vision. Hers faded enough that she could make out the scene to their right.

The trees that had appeared so thick were really only a couple of rows deep, tessellated so as to allow as little light through as possible. It was enough to block the fading afternoon sun, but not this powerful industrial beam. Beyond them was the same field.

She didn’t say anything at first. The trees were there, sparse beyond the forested strip that lay between them and the field, the same cow standing in her spot underneath. The intense beam elongated their shadows and that of the tree, which shot distortedly toward their car. The other cows were there, too, though the harsh blue-tinted light made it impossible to tell their color. The lake was black and shiny like leather, and a few cows were still drinking from it. One of them was the calf.

Despite the time of night, none of the cows were sleeping. They were grazing, drinking, wandering, or standing motionless. The light was mounted atop a huge pole, but none of the animals looked up at it, apparently used to it. Next to the light, still tall at only half the height of the pole, was a rusted metal sign, barely legible: “Tyon Town Center.”

The cow under the tree stared at them. Its eyes were huge glass marbles. She thought she could see her face in them.

They held hands and said nothing.

***

Her eyes still hurt from the light, so he drove back. They stopped at a drive-thru on the way, not having eaten since that morning. They probably passed the first field, but it was too dark and the scenery too similar to tell.

His hand was in her lap, both of hers covering his. They were mostly quiet, too tired to say much.

“You know those couples,” he said, “who are like, ‘We’re perfect because we hate the same things’?”

“I hate them,” she said. “They’re corny.”

“Yeah. Me too.” A car zipped by, smaller than hers, but fast enough to set the chassis rocking gently side-to-side. “I guess we’re one of those couples, but for them.” She didn’t answer.

“We’re not one of them, though. Right?” he asked after a few seconds of silence.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “We like things together, too. Like cows.”

“That’s true,” he said. “We do like cows.”

Another livestock trailer rattled to their left, swaying erratically atop its missing wheel.

“Watch out,” she said, and he jerked the wheel to the right, narrowly cutting off a car that proceeded to blare its horn at them while coming to a sudden, squealing halt.

“Sorry,” he yelled, rolling down the window to wave. He couldn’t tell if the other driver heard or saw. They watched the livestock trailer vanish into the distance on the almost-unlit road, swerving more and more aggressively, about to shake itself off the hitch.

After about a mile, they hit a red light. The hazy crimson light showed the truck and its trailer lying on the side of the road. The driver had climbed out, apparently unharmed, and was prying open the trailer door. He managed to lift it up, holding it above his head with both arms, flashlight between his teeth to check on his cargo.

They watched the driver guide something out of the trailer. After a few seconds of coaxing, the calf walked steadily toward the grass off the shoulder, made red and black by the traffic light. It bent to take a mouthful and lifted its head. It met his eyes and held them.

It wasn’t hurt. It wasn’t even confused. It stood there, staring. The beam of the flashlight reflected off of its eyes and into his, two yellow pinpoints dwarfed by oceans of pristine black.

The traffic light didn’t change. He put his hand back into hers. The light would never change. The light would stay red forever. She closed her hand around his. Every traffic light in the world, every traffic light in Texas, would continue glowing steadfastly red until the end of time.

The calf looked at them. They looked back.