When I was a June twenty-two, one week fresh from graduation, I took a flight to Lubbock and wore cowboy hats with friends as young and sweet as grass. One night we put on skirts and tall boots and ambled through the halls of an old restaurant, bourbon and whiskey in glasses, all very kin to cigars and mustaches, dark with ranch wood. The stars would be bright, the moon uncommonly full in that wide sky, so we stepped outside, a slight chill wrapping down our boots and around our ankles, expecting Texas. Instead, the screams of a child-- two children? more?--broke the twilight, and I gaped up--up, for they were in the trees, perched and wailing at the coming dark, pleading in a language I couldn't decipher. “Peacocks,” a man said, amused, thumb in his pocket. I know because I stared at him in astonishment. Pressed pants. No belt buckle. Thin tie. No cowboy hat. Peacocks in trees, their tail feathers draped ...
