There isn't much to it

You're going to want more out of this than I've got. I said that on the phone and you said that was fine, so here we are.

Elizabeth City originally. Went in at eighteen out of the recruiter's office on Ehringhaus and came out in 13. Twenty-four years, machinist's mate the whole way. Now I'm on buses for the district. Sixty-some out of our lot and about nine of them are mine on a given morning.

In ninety-one I was on a Knox class frigate. Single screw, twelve hundred pound plant. I was twenty years old and I weighed a hundred and fifty-five pounds and you could count my ribs through the t-shirt. Charlene's seen those pictures and she says that's not me.

I ran the evaps. That's the distilling plant. It takes seawater and boils it under a vacuum so it comes off at a low temperature, and you get water people can drink out of one side and feed water for the boilers out of the other, and the boiler water's got to be cleaner than what people drink, which nobody believes when you tell them. Salinity cell trips and you dump the whole batch over the side and start again. Plant's down six hours and the showers get secured. Then you've got three hundred men who haven't washed, in a hundred and fifteen degrees, and every one of them knows your name and where you sleep.

Upper level ran about one fifteen. At the boiler front it's a hundred and forty and you don't stand there any longer than you have to. You come off watch and your coveralls are white across the shoulders where the salt dried. We took readings every hour and wrote them in the log in pencil, and the chief read every line of it, and if he couldn't make out your fours you did the whole sheet again.

Every couple months the tubes scale up and your production falls off and you've got to acid clean. Inhibited muriatic. You circulate it and watch the color come up, and you're in a rubber apron and a face shield in a space that's already hot enough. Takes most of a day. I never minded it any.

I don't know what part of this you're after. You told me start anywhere.

There was a guy in my division named Shifflett. Same watch section the whole run, midnight to four. You can't hear a thing down there so you talk right into somebody's ear. He was from Pulaski. His daddy had a tire shop. He could sleep standing up against the evap flat and come to about ten seconds before the hourly, every time.

It was four times. Twice on the ship and twice on the pier in Bahrain, down the end past the connex boxes where the fuel barge tied up.

It smelled like low tide. The rats down there were the size of cats and nobody did a thing about them the whole time we were in.

They'd put a man off in Rota the cruise before ours and he went home with paper that follows you the rest of your life, and you're working on twenty from the day you raise your hand. It comes to twenty-six hundred and some change a month right now and it shows up whether I get out of bed or not.

Did it anyway. Four times. So that's the whole of it.

We never talked about it. He went to Great Lakes at the end of that year and I went to a tender in Charleston. I looked him up on the computer one time, ten or eleven years ago now. There's a couple hundred Shiffletts in Virginia. I shut the laptop and went to bed.

Shoulder went in 04. I had a cheater pipe on a bonnet nut and the nut let go and I came down across the deck plates. They cut on it twice. It clicks now and it won't go up past about here.

I don't take my shirt off at the beach anymore. We do Nags Head a week every August with my oldest and the grandbaby, and Charlene got me one of those swim shirts at the Walmart up in Kitty Hawk, so I've got the system down now. Before that it was a regular t-shirt and you ride home with a wet back the whole way to the Wright Memorial.

Thanksgiving Nate was home. Middle one. He's on a can out of Mayport doing about what I did, except it's all turbines now and they make their water a different way.

I'd gone in the kitchen for a trash bag out from under the sink. He said they put a guy off his ship back in August. I said for what. He said you know. Then he stood there and let it sit, which is a thing he gets off his mother, and then he said did y'all have that when you were in. I said knew a few, and one time it was me. He said huh. Took the bag out of my hand and carried it out to the can by the fence.

Lions were down about seventeen. My oldest was hollering at the television about the spread and Charlene brought the pie out at the half the way she does. Nate flew back Sunday night.

Charlene doesn't know. Twenty-eight years in June.

I'm at the lot at ten after five. Two fourteen's got a slow leak on the right rear service brake, had it since about March, and every week I put it on the sheet and every week something gets in front of it. Wintertime you go around and plug the block heaters in the night before and half the cords are laying on the ground by morning because the drivers catch them with their feet.