In sonar, the supervisor tore the headphones off his head. What was a dull thump to the rest of the crew was a blast of noise to him. After hours of straining to hear the slightest trace of Boise, it was like a flashbulb going off in a darkened room. He put the earphones back on as soon as the blast noise waned.
Immediately after the boom came the groaning, wrenching sound of the Boise’s hull being torn apart. It was a sound he’d never heard before, but it was instantly recognizable. He could see in his mind the keel bending and the steel bulkheads giving way and admitting the sea. It reminded him of the sad cries the whales made.
Next came a loud, high-pitched hissing.
“What’s that?” said one of his men.
“Air banks,” he answered. The sound grew louder, as the tanks tore apart releasing thousands upon thousands of pounds of compressed air into the ocean, the emergency air banks that were supposed to save the Boise but never would. Soon he heard a similar hiss, but oscillating, falling away. He realized it was small gas cylinders sinking, punctured or with their valves torn off, spinning as they fell, the escaping gas spinning them like pinwheels.
Next came loud, staccato popping. It was a sound that they recognized from improperly conducted trash disposaclass="underline" the sound of glass bottles popping as they passed through their own collapse depth. It’s why they kept a metal rod in the TDU room, to smash glass bottles before ejecting them. But there was no one left on the Boise to worry about it. Bottles of salad dressing and mayonnaise, every glass jar on the ship, fell to the bottom, until it could stand the pressure no more and imploded in an instant with a sound like a gunshot that travelled for hundreds of miles. As the hissing subsided, those random pops grew in frequency, like a string of fire crackers. As it reached its crescendo, the supervisor pictured a school of bottles floating downward together, tumbling, until they were obliterated by sea pressure a mile below the surface.
The pops slowed and disappeared.
The ocean was silent again.
Honolulu
Master Chief Cote was cleaning out his desk; after more than three decades it was his last day in the Navy. He’d declined to have a retirement ceremony, even though he was certainly entitled. He always found them a little embarrassing, and uncomfortably reminiscent of funerals.
It was a day at some level he thought would never come; he couldn’t picture himself out of uniform. He saw those other retirees puttering around, they tended to hover around the military towns they were comfortable with, to be close to VA medical facilities and people who understood their sea stories. They were easy to spot, the men with white hair kept short, and “casual’ clothes that were pressed a little too well, khaki shorts with razor creases and golf shirts tucked in tautly, RVs that were cleaned as if ready for inspection.
His office had accumulated a lot of crap during his shore tour, and he had to sort it into three piles: His personal possessions which would follow him home. Items that were classified because of medical privacy, patient records and the like. And items that were classified because of military secrecy, anything with the record of a specific ship’s movement or details about its mission. He’d briefed his replacement about all the navy material he was leaving behind, and the personal stack was small; he could fit it all in a box on his way out.
He reached a bookshelf near his door which was piled high with medial reference books and paper. It was the last major shit heap in his office, and was one he’d been avoiding cleaning up because it was so daunting. Laying on top of it was an unmarked manila envelope. He picked it up and looked inside.
The first thing he pulled out was a military ID card for Petty Officer William Dunham.
Cote took the envelope to his desk and dumped it out.
He had, he could soon see, the personal effects of Will Dunham, the items that were with him when he arrived at Tripler. Somehow they had ended up in his office. He knew he’d never seen them before, he had too much of an interest in Dunham, had thought about him too often, to forget that he had this trove of information about the young man. Someone, probably on that first day, had probably heard that Cote was involved in the case and had dropped off the envelope in his office. Maybe they’d meant to remind him later and forgot, who knows.
His name tag was in there, with the crest of the USS Boise to the right of the word DUNHAM. Two standard issue black navy ballpoint pens, the type that hadn’t changed in Cote’s entire career. Another unchanging artifact of a naval career: one of the small green notebooks designed to fit in a back pocket, to record everything that needed to be done: his first chief had called his a “paper brain.” Dunham’s was filled with neat script, observations from his watch, notes from training, several phone numbers in back with Honolulu area codes. The heaviest object in the envelope was a “leatherman” in its leather sheath, a foldable tool that every mechanic carried on his belt, containing a knife, screwdriver, and, handiest of all, needle nose pliers. Cote would have to submit it all to a heartless bureaucracy where it would, at some point and after a thorough and pointless examination and inventory, end up in the mailbox of a grieving parent, just in time to reopen the wounds of their loss.
Cote was almost ready to put it away when he found a small envelope at the bottom, addressed and stamped. It was addressed to a girl.
The envelope was unsealed. He opened it and pulled out a single piece of stationery.
Dear Ashley:
So this is the letter I promised you.
We’re getting ready to pull out soon, as you know. It looks like they’re not sending me to the brig, which is good news. Although at least there I would be closer to you.
I am working my ass off in the galley, scrubbing pots and busting suds. Although tonight I got a few minutes and went topside to watch the sun set over the ocean, it was beautiful. Out here you can actually watch it move, sink below the ocean until it disappears, us spinning around that thing all these millions of miles away. We’re so far away, but it means everything, day and night, winter and summer.
I’ve noticed before sometimes when I’m really tired I think of things from my childhood. Not always super happy things, sometimes really boring things like my dad’s old car or the way my brother would sometimes cook us ramen for dinner when my parents were working late.
But now all I do is think of you. Maybe the nicest thing you’ve done for me is change the way I think, the way I look at the world now as a place where great things can happen to me. Even when I think now about the times before we met, I like to think about how that event, that decision, led me to you.
You are the sun that all my memories orbit around.
Cote stopped reading there, suddenly feeling guilty for violating the dead sailor’s privacy. He hesitated for a minute. He sealed up the large manila envelope of Dunham’s things and put it on his stack, things to be dealt with by his successor. But he sealed the love letter and stuck it in his shirt pocket.
A few hours later, Cote left Tripler for the last time. The Hawaiian sunshine was blinding, and he paused for a few moments of the steps. No one was waiting for him, thank God, no one was there with a bundle of Mylar balloons to mark his retirement.
He looked both ways, and jogged across the street to a blue mailbox. He took the letter from his pocket, and in his last act in uniform, he dropped Dunham’s love letter in the mail.