He was my chief for two years

I rig at a yard on the Elizabeth River. Eight years in October. It's good work. I don't go up anymore, because my right arm won't come past my ear since 2009, so one of the young guys takes the top shackle and I stand on the plate and call it.

That was a stores load in a swell off a different ship, and the wire came back on me. They'll tell you it was the swell. I was in the bight. I'd have chewed anybody else out for it.

The boys are nine and seven. My wife does scheduling for a dental office off Kempsville. On the first of the month I send money to Cavite for my mother, and that's out of the retirement. She's got a woman comes in twice a week now. My dad did twenty-two years and my grandfather cooked for officers at Sangley before they shut it down, so I'm the third one.

Guys at the yard hear about how it was back then and they think I'm making it bigger than it was.

You didn't have to get caught doing anything. You say the wrong thing to the wrong guy, or somebody says it about you, and there's a board and you're off the ship. No retirement, no medical. Not a rumor going around. A letter. Somebody's ex-wife writes a letter to a command and that's the whole thing started.

I was on a destroyer homeported in Yokosuka from 04 to 07. Hull 63. Deployed in 05 and again in 06. Guam, Singapore, Chinhae, Laem Chabang, and Hong Kong the December of the first one.

The chief ran deck department. He was from Nacogdoches, Texas, and he had nineteen years in when I got there. He was divorced. He had a daughter down in Texas he saw at Christmas and a truck sitting in storage up in Bremerton. Negative on a car over there, everybody took the train.

He wrote my evals. A chief writes the words and the officer signs his name at the bottom. The words are what make you first class. Or don't.

He had a place off base, up the hill behind the bar street, over a dry cleaner. Two burners and a window unit that ran all year. He kept a bicycle chained at the bottom of the stairs.

The first time I went up there was a Sunday in February of 05. He'd bought a kerosene heater at the home center and it was too much to get up those stairs with one hand on a bike.

I'm not going to lay it out. It happened, and I came back down about an hour later and got the train, and I had the quarterdeck at 0700 the next morning.

We made rules that night out on the landing. Never anything on the ship. I didn't have his number in my phone. He didn't have mine. No e-mail at all, and understand that back then everybody had the one Yahoo account and you used it on the ship's computers with four guys in line behind you reading over your shoulder. If we came off the brow at the same time, one of us turned left on the pier and went the long way around the crane.

Two years of that. Sundays mostly, when we were in. He cooked one thing, chili out of a can with hot dogs cut up in it, and he'd put it down every time like it was going to surprise me. The TV got AFN and the Japanese channels, so there was baseball on with nobody talking, and in January the sumo.

On the ship he was harder on me than he was on anybody. He chewed me out at quarters in front of the whole division over a bad shot of paint on the starboard breakwater, and guys used to say he had it in for me. One of my seamen asked me one time what I did to him.

In Sasebo a chief off another ship saw the two of us come out of a McDonald's at six-thirty in the morning. He said morning, Chief, and kept walking. I went back aboard and threw up in the forward head and then stood there a while holding onto the sink.

I didn't eat that day. Nothing ever came of it. Negative, nobody ever said a word to anybody. I don't believe it was anything.

My mother would ask on the phone card calls whether I had anybody yet. I'd be out on the pier at the phones with a line behind me for that too. Not yet, ma. I said that for two years.

He put in for shore duty in the spring. Orders came in July and he detached in November, to Mayport. He gave the bike to a kid in third division.

The day he left I had the quarterdeck, which I traded a Saturday duty for. He came off with a seabag and one of the hard cases. He shook my hand and said take care of yourself, BM2, and I said aye, Chief. He went down the pier and got in the van.

I haven't talked to him since. Texas probably, or wherever the daughter ended up.

The last eval he wrote on me was March of 06. Early promote, which is the top block. I made first class that September off that one and the one before it.

I met Rosie in 2013 at a christening out in Virginia Beach and we got married two years after at the church on Princess Anne. Eleven years in March.

There's a box under the stairs with both cruise books in it and one of my dad's off the Coral Sea, and a sandwich bag of yen nobody can spend. The phone I had then is in there. One of the silver flip ones with the Japanese SIM still in it. It doesn't come on.

My younger one has ball Saturdays out past Kempsville and I'm the one takes him, because Rosie has her mother on Saturdays.

My older boy got the cruise book out tonight and made me go through the whole thing at the table. Who's this, who's that. Deck department's back around page sixty, behind the engineers, and everybody's in coveralls and nobody's smiling in any of them. I got to our page and I said that's Chief, he was my boss for two years, and the boy said he looks mad in the picture, and I said everybody looks mad in those. Rosie was at the table the whole time on her phone.

He's still got it open. Rosie's asking what we're doing about dinner.