Next Stop, Meteor Crater

Apartment Simple: At night the skunks come down out of the forest to eat seed dropped by the birds that frequent our feeder. The skunks lick barbecue drippings and taunt the locked-up dogs below. I'm glad we live on the second floor and don't have to hear them snickering in the grass outside our windows. Instead I stand on our balcony and stare down at their squirming backs. I drop sunflower husks and hiss like a tomcat—trying to provoke them into spraying the neighbors' windows.

It's like this here.

The Numbers: Inside our tiny barren apartment, Rachel glues scraps of broken mirror and plastic monkeys to picture frames. "Screw the broken luck," she seems to say. I can't hear anything, though, because the bathroom fan rattles like a lawn mower. We've been engaged for two months now after making the jump with my proposal at a Hot Springs resort in Costa Rica. I am 25 and she is 24. We live together and work together in a new town, hundreds of miles away from our Kansas home. Rachel graduated just three months ago, and I had been painting houses for ten months in our hometown, just itching to leave, before we packed up and moved to apartment number 2655B in the Forest Ridge Complex. Tomorrow the alarm will sound at 5:30 like it does every morning now. Each of us will pull on brown pants, a beige shirt with the three standard shoulder patches, and we will leave before the sun comes up. We will pick up Carlos at 6:15 and drive 45 minutes to the Meteor Crater Natural Landmark, 40 miles east of Flagstaff, where we all work ten hours a day, four days a week.

Big Ol' Country Monday: I-40 early morning and it's just us and the truckers. Fools of a different feather. Carlos, the 45-year-old recovering addict, sits cross-legged in the back seat of our Toyota. His eyes are closed. He appears to be mentally preparing himself for his day of work at the Meteor Crater snack bar. This morning I have sewage trap duty and Rachel works in the Rock Shop cracking geodes. Later we'll get to guide some tours on the rim. Carlos will stay in the snack bar all day. The sun has barely split the horizon and I'm already thinking about the end of the day, the drive home, and the squirming skunks. On NPR Nina Totenberg talks about a recent Supreme Court decision. The morning highway rolls out naked and whiskered with frost. Carlos recites his poem "Pocket Watch." Tick, tock. Tick, tock. When will he shut the hell up? Slowly, I twist the volume knob until Nina's voice crackles with static and my speakers fuzz. Backseat drivers are one thing. Backseat poets are something else.This must be the fourth time in two weeks I've heard "Pocket Watch." Carlos keeps adding stanzas and removing lines. Pocket Watch, Pocket Watch, how does your garden grow? But I can't decide which is worse, the imposition of bad poetry or his detailed stories of wild times in Long Beach, including passing mention of anal sex with Freddy Krueger and coke parties with soap opera stars. I don't ask him to elaborate. Carlos moved out here to shake his methamphetamine habit. Now he lives with his 35-year-old nephew's family and commutes to work with us. He doesn't have a car of his own. He's thinking about buying a moped. Once we invited him to our house for dinner after work and he wasn't there ten minutes before he had his shirt off and was dancing around our living room in a frenzied form of what he called "relaxation exercises"—something that looked more like a bizarre mating ritual of South American waterfowl. This is just one of the times that I've...