Red Rice for the Fleet

Curbside

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz, Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes, Illinois. Week One.**

Dear Tun,

They gave us twenty minutes to write, and I spent four of them deciding whether to call you Tun or Grandpa on paper, because on paper it looks like I am writing to a man with a title. Which I guess I am. You always said the title was earned at the stove. So, Tun.

First, I am alive. You probably heard that already, because they let us make one call when we got here, and they hand you a card with the words on it so you don't cry or say anything stupid. I read it to Mom. "I have arrived safely at Recruit Training Command. Please do not send any packages. I will contact you in three to five days with my address." I said it like a hostage. Mom said "okay baby" four times. I could hear Jace in the background asking if I got my hair cut off. I did not. Women keep it if it fits in a bun under the cover, and mine fits if I fight it.

Here is what I want to tell you before I forget, because they say the first week erases your brain and I believe them.

At the airport curb in San Diego, when Dad stopped the car in the white zone and the security man was already waving at us to move, I took your hand and bent and put my nose to the back of it, and you laughed. You laughed out loud right there at Departures. I have been doing nginge' to you since I could stand up on a chair, and you have never once laughed, and I want to know why you did it then. I was trying to be respectful and you made me look like I was smelling a ham.

I am not mad. I have been thinking about it on the bus and on the plane and in the line where they took our civilian clothes and put them in a box with our names on it to mail home. Your hand smelled like the green bar soap you buy in packs of twelve and the inside of the Malibu, which is vinyl and that green tree you hang off the mirror. It also smelled like onions. Did you chop onions before you drove me to the airport at four in the morning? Who does that?

Okay, the place. It is cold in a way I did not know air could be. We came in at night and the bus windows were sweating on the inside and through the sweat I could see orange lights on snow, piles of it shoved against the curbs like dirty laundry. The lake is out there somewhere. People keep saying "the lake" like it is a person who might be listening. I have not seen it yet. I can smell it though, or I think I can, a smell like a cold metal spoon.

They call the barracks a ship. Our building has a ship's name, and the floors are called decks, and the walls are bulkheads, and if you call a bathroom a bathroom a woman with a voice like a table saw will explain to you very slowly that it is a head. Our Recruit Division Commanders are Chief Ferrante and Petty Officer Dewitt. Chief Ferrante is short and never sits. Petty Officer Dewitt is tall and has eyes that do not blink when he counts us, which is about forty times a day.

There is a girl in the rack above me named Kaylee Wozniak from Toledo, Ohio, who snores like she is trying to start a lawnmower. She asked where I was from and I said San Diego and she said "oh like the beach" and I said no, like National City, and she said "is that near the beach," and I said everything in San Diego is near the beach, Kaylee, that is the whole problem with it. Then I said my family is from Guam and she said "is that in Hawaii" and I want you to know I did not hit her. I said it is farther. I said it is the place where America's day starts. That is your line. I stole it.

I want to ask you something real, and you can answer it on the recording, because Mom said Jace set up the phone on the kitchen table to record you and type it up and print it so I can read it here, since they won't let me have my phone. Jace says he will put the sound in the family page too, where only we can get in, so when I get out I can hear it. He says he is "archiving" you. You should charge him.

The question is this. When you left Guam, did anybody laugh at you at the curb?

I have to go, they are yelling the word "Divisionnn" which means something is about to happen to us.

Your granddaughter, who did not cry at the airport, whatever Jace says,
Leilani

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table, National City. January 15. Typed by Jace (age 14, unpaid).**

Is it on? The red one is on. Okay.

Leilani. Håfa Adai, you skinny recruit. Your brother is pointing the phone at my face like he is a dentist.

First thing. I laughed because you did the nginge' with your eyes closed. Nobody closes their eyes. You do it the way your Tan Chon taught you when you were three, you bend, you touch the nose to the back of the hand, you breathe in a little, you stand. It is a greeting, not a prayer. You closed your eyes like you were going to remember my hand forever because you were never coming back, and you are going to Illinois, not the moon. That is why I laughed. Also, you said "Tun" in that voice. The airport voice. I have only heard that voice from the girl at the airline counter.

Second thing. Yes, I chopped onions at three-thirty in the morning. I was making the kelaguen for your mother, because you were leaving and she was going to come home and sit in your room and I wanted her to have something to eat that would make her mad at me instead. She is mad at me now. She says there is too much lemon. There is never too much lemon.

Now your question. When I left Guam, nobody laughed at me. My nana cried in the kitchen and would not come out to the road, and my tata stood by the truck with his hat in both hands like he was going to give it to somebody. It was August of 1960. I was eighteen. My sister Charing was thirteen and she was the only one who said anything smart. She said, "Bring back a refrigerator." That is what she wanted from America. A refrigerator with a freezer on top. I did, eventually. It took nine years.

I did not leave from an airport like you. There was the airport at Agana for the Navy and the government people, but they put a group of us from the south on a bus to the base, and from there we went. Six of us from Inarajan and Merizo and Umatac, and two from Agat. We had a recruiter, a petty officer with a Texas mouth, and he had already told us what we were going to be. He said it nice. He said, "You boys are going to be stewards." He said it like he was telling us we had won something.

Jace, stop making that face, you'll type the face. I'll explain.

Leilani, in that time a man from Guam who joined the Navy, most of the time, the door they opened for him was the steward door. For us it was not a written rule. It was where the recruiters pointed. For the Filipino boys who signed up in the Philippines it was written down: steward, and only steward, until the early seventies. For us there were other doors, but they were heavy, and nobody was holding them. The steward door was propped open with a brick. So you walked in. The steward worked for the officers. You cooked the officers' meals in the wardroom pantry, you served them at the table with a towel on your arm, you cleaned their rooms, you made their racks, you pressed their khakis, you shined the brass. On a small ship you did all of it. On a big ship there were enough of you to split it up.

I want you to hear this part right, because you're going to hear other people tell it like it was shame. It was work. Hard work, and some of it was not fair, and I knew it was not fair, and I did it better than anybody on that ship because I am from Inarajan and my nana would have come across the ocean on foot if I did a sloppy job. I did that work for fifteen years and then the rules changed and I did a different work for seven more. Twenty-two years. That's a career. You can put it on your wall.

We had boot camp in San Diego, did you know that? Not in the snow. In San Diego, by the airport, by the bay. So when you were standing at the curb at Lindbergh, you were maybe a mile from where I learned to fold a shirt. I thought about that when you bent down. I thought, this girl does not know she is standing next to my first Navy laundry.

Boot camp in 1960 for me: the sun. You are going to tell me about cold and I am going to tell you the sun. The grinder, that's the big drill field, it was black and it was soft in the afternoon, it stuck to your shoes. The air smelled like jet fuel from the airport next door and salt from the bay and the pine oil they used on the barracks floors. I had never been so dry in my life. Guam is wet. You breathe there and you're drinking. San Diego you breathe and your lips crack.

What else. The Texas petty officer, at the end, he gave me a can of shoe polish. Black, in the round tin. He said, "Cruz, you'll need this more than the rest of them." I didn't know if it was an insult. I decided it was a present. I still have the can. It's empty. It's in the drawer with the batteries. Jace, don't throw it out.

Okay, the girl from Toledo. Be nice to her. Ohio is also far from the ocean. People far from the ocean think everything on the map that's blue is the same blue. They don't know the Pacific is a hundred blues and every one of them has a name somebody's grandfather gave it. You tell her that if she asks again. Or tell her Guam has the deepest water in the world right next to it, almost seven miles down, and see if she sleeps after that.

And tell me about the lake when you see it. I have seen the Atlantic, I have seen the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, the Sea of Japan, the Bering Sea which nobody should see. I have never seen one of the big lakes. I want to know if it's honest, or if it's pretending.

Is that enough? Jace says I am at nine minutes. He says the printer is out of the black ink again, so you might get this in blue. If you get it in blue, I said it in black.

Eat what they give you. Even if it's sad. Especially if it's sad. Sad food is still somebody's shift. That's all. Turn it off. Which one, the red?

Hospital Corners

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Two.**

Dear Tun,

Your letter came in blue. I read it in black.

Jace's note on top said "Do not laugh at my typing, I typed what he SAID," and I didn't laugh at the typing. I laughed at "skinny recruit," out loud, in the compartment, at mail call, which you are not supposed to do, and Petty Officer Dewitt turned around and looked at me for about a year. Then he kept handing out mail. I think the look was the punishment. It worked.

I saw the lake. Here is my report.

It is not honest. You were right to ask. It pretends to be an ocean, it has the flat line at the end and the gray color and the wind coming off it that cuts through the issued sweatshirt like the sweatshirt is made of a rumor. But it doesn't smell like salt. It smells like nothing, like a refrigerator that was just cleaned. And it doesn't move the way the Pacific moves. At Imperial Beach the water comes at you in long arms. Here it shivers. We marched past it in the dark at five in the morning and there was ice along the edge like broken plates, and the whole thing was steaming, little ghosts coming off the water into the air, and somebody behind me said "the lake is smoking" and Chief Ferrante said "the lake is warmer than you, Recruit, that's all that is." I don't know if that is science. It sounded like science.

Now I have to tell you about the racks, because you of all people will understand.

You make your rack every morning to a standard. The sheet is tight enough that they drop a quarter on it, which I thought was a movie thing, but no, Petty Officer Dewitt carries a quarter. The corners are hospital corners, forty-five degrees. The blanket fold at the top is a certain number of inches, and there is a measuring stick that is basically a ruler with a grudge. The first morning, mine was so bad that Chief Ferrante didn't even yell. She just pulled the whole thing off onto the deck and stood there while I did it again, and she did it four more times, and every time she pulled it off she said, "Again," in the same tone, like she was reading a weather report.

On the fifth one, I did the thing you showed me when I was seven. Remember? When Tan Chon was sick that winter and I stayed with you, and you made my bed with me on the floor of the spare room and made me do the corners over until I could do them with my eyes shut. You said, "Pull the sheet down to the floor in a straight line first, the corner comes from the line, not from the hand." I didn't remember that I remembered it until my hands did it. Then the corner just happened. Chief Ferrante looked at it for a long time and didn't pull it off, which is the most anybody has ever loved me in this building.

Kaylee asked me who taught me and I said my grandpa was in the Navy and she said "was he a SEAL" and I said no, he made beds for officers. I said it fast to see what she'd do. She said, "That's so cool, that's like a butler on a battleship." I didn't know how to feel about that, so I'm telling you.

Here is my real question, and you can say no. You said in your recording that some of it was not fair and you knew it was not fair. What wasn't fair? You don't have to make it nice for me. I'm in the Navy now. I want to know what you saw.

Also, we did the ironing class. They taught us to iron the creases in the shirt. I already knew. I didn't say anything. I let the instructor tell me about steam.

There's a girl from Atlanta named Imani Batts who is the fastest at everything and the slowest at waking up. She sleeps through reveille the way some people sleep through a train. Kaylee and I have to physically lift her out of the rack. I told her my grandfather says sad food is still somebody's shift, and she thought about it, and she said, "Then the people on this shift are very, very sad." That was about the oatmeal.

Love,
Leilani
P.S. Is the Malibu still making the sound when you turn left?

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table. January 24. Typed by Jace.**

The Malibu is fine. The sound is the car telling me it is forty-eight years old. I make sounds when I turn left too.

I'm going to answer the butler thing first, because the girl from Ohio is not wrong and not right.

A butler works for a family. A steward on a destroyer works for a wardroom, that's the officers' table, and the wardroom on my first ship, the Kessling, was eighteen men. Captain, executive officer, department heads, the junior officers, the ensigns who just came out of school and didn't know which fork. And there were five of us stewards to keep them. So I was not a butler on a battleship. I was one of five men keeping eighteen men fed and pressed and clean on a ship that rolled thirty degrees in a good wind.

Let me tell you the day, so you know. Reveille for us was before reveille. Four o'clock. The pantry was behind the wardroom, a steel room the size of your mother's bathroom, with a small range and a coffee urn and a steam table, and you could touch both bulkheads if you held your arms out, and when the ship rolled you held your arms out. First the coffee. Officers wanted their coffee strong, so I learned to make it the way Arvel Boatwright made it in the crew's galley, with a pinch of salt in the grounds to take the bitter off. That's a Navy trick. Don't tell your father, he'll put salt in everything.

Breakfast at six-thirty. Eggs to order, eighteen men, and every one of them had an order. The captain wanted his eggs over easy and his toast cut corner to corner, not across. The chief engineer wanted oatmeal with raisins and no other thing. One ensign from Boston, I can't remember his name now, Jace, I'm lying, I remember it, I won't say it, he wanted his bacon the way you'd want a cracker. So I did that. Then the tables cleared and the linens. White linens on a destroyer, Leilani. We pressed tablecloths in a ship's laundry that was hotter than any galley, with sea water coming up in the deck drain when the bow went down.

Then the staterooms. Racks made. Desks dusted. Brass, which there was too much of. Shoes. The khakis pressed, two creases on the front of the shirt, the pockets sharp. You know creases already, you said so. I'm proud you let the instructor tell you about steam.

Then lunch for eighteen. Then dinner for eighteen, with the good silver, and you stood behind the chairs with the towel over the arm and you didn't speak unless spoken to, and you watched every water glass. If a glass was half, you filled it. That's the job. You don't wait to be asked. I was proud of that. I'm still proud of it. You go to any restaurant with me, I see the water glasses before I see the menu, you've seen me do it, you think I'm cheap and looking at prices. I'm checking their waiter.

What wasn't fair. Okay.

We were the steward branch and we stayed the steward branch. That's what wasn't fair. A white boy from Kentucky who came in the same day as me could go and be a radarman, an electrician, a boatswain, whatever he could pass the test for. My papers said steward, and if I wanted to change, I had to ask, and the asking went up and up and mostly did not come back down. Some guys made it out. More now than then. Johnny Aguon, from Agat, my friend from the bus to the base, he got out to become a storekeeper after nine years, and he had to try for four of them. I tried one time, in 1966. I wanted to be a machinist's mate. I liked engines. You know I like engines, look at the car. The answer came back that the branch needed me where I was. Which was true, by the way. They did need me. That was the trouble.

Also. We ate after. The officers ate, and then we ate, in the pantry, standing up, from what came back. Not leftovers off the plates, I don't mean that, from the pans. But standing up. On holidays in the crew's mess there was turkey and ham and everybody together, and at the wardroom table there were candles, and we were not at either one. We were the people carrying the candles.

I'm not going to say more than that because I don't want you to walk around Great Lakes angry. You have enough to do. Angry is a heavy bag, and you are carrying a seabag already.

Here's the other side, and this is just as true. I learned to cook in those pantries. Those men I fed, some of them were good men, some of them I'd let marry your cousins. One of them, a lieutenant from Iowa, when he made commander, he wrote a letter, a real letter, to my chief, and he said I was the reason the wardroom held together through a bad Westpac cruise. I have it. Your Tan Chon framed it and put it in the hallway, next to your third-grade picture where you have no front teeth. Look at it when you come home. It's the frame with the gold flake.

And I learned this. You do something well, even if somebody gave it to you because they thought it was all you could do, and you do it so well that the place cannot run without you. That's not the end of the fight. But that's how you're standing when it starts.

Your Chief who pulled the bed apart five times. I like her. She's not trying to make you cry. She's trying to see if the corner comes from your hand or from the line. Now she knows.

Tell the Atlanta girl, the one who sleeps, tell her a steward never sleeps through reveille because the coffee is waiting and the coffee will not forgive. Tell her the oatmeal is sad because it was made in a kettle the size of a bathtub at three in the morning by a nineteen-year-old who wants to go home. Eat it anyway. Put salt in it if they let you. A pinch.

Jace wants to ask a question. Fine. Ask.

(Jace: Did you ever drop a tray?)

Once. 1961. In front of the captain. Pot roast. The ship took a roll and the gravy went across the deck like it had somewhere to be. The captain looked at it and said, "Cruz, I believe the gravy is trying to desert." I didn't know what desert meant with an S like that. I thought he said dessert. I said, "No sir, this is the main course." He laughed so hard the executive officer had to get him water. They called me Main Course for a year.

Okay. That's enough. Your brother is yawning, and he still has to type all this with two fingers before the mailman comes. Leilani, do your corners. They come from the line.

Thirty-Two Pounds

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Three.**

Dear Tun,

They march us to the galley three times a day in the dark or the almost dark, and today I counted the steps from our ship to the door. Four hundred and eleven. I counted because Imani bet me a cookie that it was over five hundred. Nobody here has a cookie. The bet was purely for honor.

I want to describe the galley to you, because I know you'll want the details and because I have nothing else to look at for the twenty minutes we get to eat.

It is huge, way bigger than any cafeteria at Sweetwater High. Long steel counters, those sneeze guards, trays in stacks that clang when they come out of the dishwasher still hot, so hot you can feel them through the paper napkin. The windows are fogged on the inside all the time. The walls are a color I can only describe as "beige with a past." There is a smell that hits you at the door, and it is always the same smell no matter what's for breakfast or dinner. Steam. Bleach water. Something brown. Toast. Somewhere under all that, coffee that has been sitting since the Korean War.

The cooks are Culinary Specialists. That's what they call the job now. They wear white and they are mostly young and very serious, and one of them, a woman with a gold tooth and a forearm burn shaped exactly like Florida, hands out the main thing and says "Enjoy" to every single recruit. Every one. Hundreds. She says it like she means it each time. I've been watching her for a week. I can't figure out if she is the nicest person in Illinois or if it is a very long joke.

Okay, the rice. The rice here is white. It is always white. It's clumped in the hotel pan like it is afraid of something. I took a spoonful the first day because I thought, rice is rice, I'll be home in my head. It was not rice the way rice is rice. It was rice the way a photo of rice is rice.

So I'm asking. Did you ever make red rice for the whole ship? How did you do it for that many people? You always made it in the big pot with the dent for us on Sundays, and that pot feeds what, twenty? I want the number. I want to lie on my rack tonight and think about the number. I know that sounds weird. Everybody here has a thing they think about at lights out. Kaylee thinks about her dog, a beagle named Mustard. Imani recites the capitals of Africa because she says it's the most boring thing she knows. I want to think about rice for a lot of people.

The other thing is, we have a lot of tests now. Knowledge tests: ranks, ships, the general orders, what the flags mean. Uniform inspections. Our division failed one today because three people had strings coming off their buttons. They call loose threads "Irish pennants." Chief Ferrante holds them up between two fingers like they are a dead bug. We all had to stay up and cut each other's threads. Imani cut mine with clippers. It was actually kind of nice.

Love,
Leilani

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table, with the rice pot on the stove. January 31. Typed by Jace.**

You can hear the pot? That's the lid. It jumps. Jace, move the phone back, don't get steam in it.

Thirty-two pounds. Raw. For three hundred.

That's your number. Go to sleep with it.

Now I'll tell you how I got to thirty-two, because the number by itself is a number, and you are a Cruz and you want the story.

In 1975 the Navy put the stewards and the commissarymen together. The commissarymen were the cooks for the crew, the big galley, the main line. The stewards were the officers' side. One day they said, now you are the same thing, and the new name is Mess Management Specialist. MS. I was a first class steward, that's a petty officer first class, and overnight I was a first class MS, and I could work anywhere in the galley. They sent me to the oiler Pasayten out of San Diego, about three hundred men. And for the first time in fifteen years, I was cooking for the whole crew. Not eighteen. Three hundred.

I'll tell you something. The first week I was afraid. In the wardroom you have eighteen orders, you know each man, you know who wants his bacon like a cracker. In the big galley, nobody has a name. Three hundred trays come at you in a line like the line at your boot camp, and every man has fifteen minutes, and he wants hot food and a lot of it. You don't cook for him. You cook for the line.

The Navy had cards. Recipe cards, the official ones, from the Armed Forces Recipe Service. Each card was for one hundred portions. One hundred, always. The first time I opened that box it was like a library. Meatloaf for a hundred. Chili mac for a hundred. Beef Stroganoff, they spelled it right, for a hundred. Rice, steamed, for a hundred. So if you want three hundred, you multiply by three. Simple, right? Wrong. The card was written by somebody who never fed a sailor on the fourth week out from port. The card for rice said about ten pounds for the hundred. So three hundred is thirty, give or take. I made it thirty-two. Because sailors lie. They say they want a little rice. They want a lot of rice. You make thirty-two pounds.

But that's the white rice. That's the card. You asked about the red.

Arvel Boatwright. I told you, the chief commissaryman on my first ship, the Kessling. He was from Arkansas, a little town by a river, and he made biscuits that could make a grown man weep. He was the one who let me into the crew's galley when I wasn't supposed to be there. In 1961, at night, after the wardroom was cleaned, I used to go stand in the door of his galley, because it was warmer and it smelled like his bread, and because the guys in there talked to each other like people. He saw me watching and one night he handed me a knife and an onion and he said, "Well, if you're going to stand there." That's how it started. That's the only school I went to for cooking, standing in Arvel's door.

So in 1962, the Kessling is in Subic Bay, the Philippines. Pacifico Lagman, he was a Filipino steward on our ship, from Pampanga, he takes me into Olongapo, the town outside the base. And in the market there's a woman selling achuete. That's what Pacifico called it. Same seed. Achote, achiote, achuete, it's the same little red seed from the same tree, it just has a different name on every island. I bought a bag the size of a pillow. I carried it back through the gate. The Marine at the gate thought it was something else. He opened it and smelled it and he said, "It's dirt." I said, "It's rice." He let me through.

And on Guam Liberation Day that year, July the twenty-first, I asked Arvel if I could make the rice for the crew. One meal. I said I'd do it after my wardroom work, he didn't have to give me a man. He said, "Cruz, I've got a hundred and ninety men on this ship." That was the Kessling's number. I said, "Chief, I know." He looked at me for a long time and then he said, "Don't make it too pretty."

I made it too pretty.

Here's how. Write it down, Jace, she wants it.

For three hundred. You take the achote seeds, two pounds. You soak them in hot water, a five-gallon bucket, half full, you let them sit an hour. Then you put your hands in, and you rub them, you squeeze them, and the water goes red, red like an old fire truck. Your hands go red too. You'll have red hands for two days. Tan Chon used to say she could tell which day I made red rice by my fingernails. You strain out the seeds. Keep the water.

You chop your onions, eight pounds, and your garlic, you need a lot, a pound, more if your chief isn't looking. You sweat them in the steam kettle with the oil, a quart of oil, until the whole galley smells like a Sunday. Then the rice. Thirty-two pounds, washed. In a galley you wash it in the big colander under the faucet until the water runs clear, and it doesn't run clear, it never runs clear, you wash it until your back hurts and then you stop. The rice goes in with the onions, you stir it with the paddle, the big wood paddle like a canoe oar, until every grain is shiny. Then the achote water. Then more water to the line. Salt. Some black pepper. Some people put bell pepper. I put bell pepper when I'm in a good mood.

Then you close the kettle and you don't open it. This is the hard part. Everybody wants to open it. Don't. The rice is talking to itself in there.

When you open it, the steam comes up orange. I don't know how to say it any other way. Orange steam. And every sailor in line, the Kentucky boys, the Brooklyn boys, the farm boys, they lean over the line to look into the pan like it's a sunset.

That's the first time Arvel Boatwright called me a cook. That night. He came into the wardroom pantry while I was putting away the captain's cups and he said, "Cruz, you can cook." That's it. Four words. I think about it more than I think about my retirement.

On the Pasayten, later, when it was my galley, I made the red rice every two weeks, Thursday, with the chicken. The men called it Cruz Rice, and when we were in port in Guam, the Chamorro sailors from other ships came to eat on our mess deck, they would wait in line on the pier. That's not allowed exactly. I fed them anyway.

You see the pot on the stove right now? That's not the galley pot. That's the Sunday pot, with the dent, from your Tan Chon's mother. I make it for eight now, nine. I don't know how to make red rice for one. Nobody does. If you live alone and you make red rice, you end up feeding the neighbors, and that's how you get neighbors.

The card. You remember the card? I wrote my own card, for three hundred, on the back of a Navy one, in pencil, in 1976. Jace took a picture of it. He put it in the family page with the recipes, next to your Tan Chon's titiyas, under her handwriting. He said it's in the folder for "the shelf." I said what shelf? He said "the shelf, Tun." Okay. It's on the shelf. You'll see the grease on it. That grease is from the Pasayten. That's fifty years old.

Now, the lady with the gold tooth who says Enjoy. She's not joking. I know her. Not her, but her. Every galley has one. You stand on that line for four hours and you have two choices. You say nothing, or you say something to every face. If you say nothing your back hurts more. Tell her thank you. Look at her when you say it. Say it the way I taught you, Si Yu'os Ma'åse', if you want, she won't know what it means, she'll know what it means.

And the threads. You tell your Chief. On the Kessling, if the captain found a string on your white jacket, he didn't say anything. He just looked at the string. That was worse. Pacifico used to keep a little scissors in his pocket for all five of us. Somebody always keeps the scissors. Now it's that Atlanta girl.

I'm going to go stir. I mean I'm not going to stir. I'm going to stand there and not open it.

Shutters

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Four.**

Dear Tun,

Thirty-two pounds worked. I lay there thinking about orange steam and fell asleep before Kaylee started her lawnmower. I want you to know the number is famous now. I told Imani and she told the girl in the next rack, and now when the white rice comes out somebody in our division says "thirty-two" under their breath and three people laugh. Chief Ferrante doesn't know what it means. It's ours.

I thanked the gold-tooth lady. I said Si Yu'os Ma'åse'. She stopped with the spoon up and said "Say that again," and I did, and she said, "That's pretty, what is that, Hawaiian?" and I said Chamorro, from Guam, it's thank you, and she said, "Well, you're welcome in Chamorro," and gave me a second scoop of something. I don't know what it was. It was brown. I ate all of it in your honor.

We had a blizzard. A real one. It came off the lake sideways on Tuesday night and it didn't stop until Thursday, and they still marched us to the galley in it because the Navy doesn't care about weather, apparently, the Navy considers weather to be a civilian problem. We wore our peacoats and the wool smelled like a wet dog and a closet at the same time. The snow was so thick I could only see the back of the recruit in front of me, Imani, and the reflective belt around her waist, glowing. The whole division was a line of glowing belts in a white nothing. Somebody started humming the Navy song to keep the step. My eyelashes froze. That's real. Your eyelashes freeze together and you have to blink hard to unstick them, like a doll.

When we got back inside, they closed the heavy doors behind us and you could hear the wind hitting the building, a big flat sound like somebody slapping a mattress. And all I could think about was Tan Charing's house in Inarajan, and the shutters.

Do you remember when I was eleven and she called us on video during that storm? The big one, I think it had a name that meant a fruit. It was night there and morning here. She had the phone propped against the sugar jar and the whole house was dark except for the lantern, and all the windows were closed with the metal shutters, the gray ones, and you could hear the wind on them, this deep banging like the whole island was a drum. And she was eating crackers. Totally calm. She said, "Håfa Adai, Leilani, I'm fine, the house is concrete, your Tun's father made sure." And then a shutter banged so hard I screamed and she just kept eating her cracker.

I always wanted to ask you about that. Why was she so calm? And what did she mean, your father made sure?

Also, Jace wrote on the last printout that he's putting your ships on the family map, the one with Inarajan and National City and Tan Chon's family in Yona, and that you are "being difficult about the pins." Please don't be difficult about the pins. He is fourteen and he is trying.

Love,
Leilani
P.S. The lake froze at the edge so far out that Kaylee asked if we could walk on it. Chief Ferrante said, "Recruit, you can walk on anything once."

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table. February 7. Typed by Jace, who is NOT being difficult.**

I'm not difficult about the pins. The pins are wrong. He put the Kessling in the middle of the Pacific Ocean like a raisin on a pancake. A ship is not in the middle. A ship is somewhere. Jace, tell her what I told you.

(Jace: He said a ship always has a reason to be where it is.)

That's right. Now. Charing.

She was calm because she had done it before. Every person on Guam my age, her age, has done it before. You grow up with typhoons like you grow up with cousins. You don't like all of them but you know their names.

I'll tell you about Karen. That's the one my father made sure about.

November 1962. I'm twenty-one. I'm on the Kessling, we are off Japan, we've been in Yokosuka for repairs, then out for exercises, and the weather in the North Pacific in November is cold and green and you can taste the iron in the spray. You stand on the fantail at night, that's the back of the ship, and the wake is white and the sea around it is black, and spray comes up over the rail and it freezes on the lifelines, little beads of ice. I was out there smoking. I smoked then. Don't.

And the radioman, a boy from Oregon, he comes to find me. Not with a message for me. He just says, "Cruz, there's a big one hit your island." That's all. That's how I heard. A typhoon with a girl's name, two hundred miles an hour of wind, that's what he said, two hundred, I thought he was making it up. There was no phone. You could not call. The mail was going to take weeks. So I went back into the pantry and I made the coffee for the mid-watch officers, and I made it too strong, and I stood there.

Three weeks, Leilani, before I got a letter. Three weeks of making eighteen men's eggs. When the letter came, it was from my nana, written by Charing because my nana didn't write so well in English, and the first line was, "We are all alive. The house is gone." Those two sentences. In that order. My sister was fifteen and she knew to put them in that order.

The house was wood with a tin roof. My father built it after the war when they came back to Inarajan. The tin went somewhere over the hill toward the river. The walls went down. The family sat out the storm in the concrete school, everybody from that end of the village, all night, with the walls shaking. Nobody from my family hurt. A cousin's arm, that's all. A cousin's arm, and a pig that was found two days later in somebody else's kitchen, alive and very confused.

And my father. I was sending money home every month, from the Navy pay. I had been sending it since boot camp. A steward didn't make much, but I didn't spend much, I lived on the ship and I ate from the pantry. After Karen, my father took that money, every peso, every dollar, I should say dollar, Guam is dollars, and he did not build back with wood. He built with concrete block. It took him three years. He mixed the cement himself in a trough he made from a cut-open drum. And he put steel shutters on every window, hinged, with the big bolts to lock them from the inside. He made the shutters himself. He was not a welder. He found a man in Talofofo who was and traded him a carabao.

You can hear that? I said carabao. Like a water buffalo. Jace says nobody will believe it. It's true.

So when Charing says "Your Tun's father made sure," that's what she means. She is sitting in a house that my Navy pay and my father's back built. She has the shutters painted gray now, she paints them every few years because the salt gets in the hinges and the rust comes out like orange tears down the wall. When I visit, the first thing she tells me is how much the paint cost. That's love, on Guam. Telling your brother how much the paint cost.

She posted pictures last week, on the family page. Jace showed me. The shutters open. The yard, the breadfruit tree my father planted, the old one, it's split in half from the storm in 2023, half of it still giving fruit. The view from the back step, which is the view I had my whole boyhood: a green slope going down, the reef way out there with the white line of the surf on it, and the sky that blue they have in the dry season like a plate.

And on the ridge behind the house, if you go up past the mango trees, there are latte stones in the grass. You've seen them? The stone pillars with the cap on top, like a mushroom, like a cup turned over. The old people's houses stood on them, a long time ago, before the Spanish. These ones are short, about to my shoulder. There are six of them in two rows, and one fallen. My father wouldn't let us climb them or kick them. He'd say, "Somebody's house." He didn't say much more. I'd go up there and sit next to them in the afternoon when the wind came off the ocean and I'd think, they built here too. They knew about the wind too. They put their houses up on stone to let the water go under.

Charing put a picture of them on the map. She found where the pin goes. Not Jace. Charing. Seventy-nine years old and she figured out the pins.

Now. The ships. Jace, I'm going to do this slow.

The Kessling. Homeport San Diego, 1960 to 1964. But Westpac cruises, that's the Western Pacific, every year, so you put a pin in Subic Bay, the Philippines. A pin in Yokosuka, Japan. A pin in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, we went there twice. And put one in Hong Kong because that's where I bought your Tan Chon her first gold bracelet, before I even knew her. I bought it for whoever I was going to marry. Yes. I was that kind of young man. Put it in the note.

Then shore duty, 1964 to 1966, Naval Station San Diego, the officers' club, the big one by 32nd Street. That's when I met your Tan Chon. That's its own pin. Don't put it on the base. Put it on the dance hall in National City. I'll tell her about that later.

Then the carrier, 1966 to 1970. Out of Alameda, by San Francisco. Westpac cruises, with Yokosuka and Subic in between. Put a pin in the Gulf of Tonkin, but small. Don't write anything on that one. Just put it.

Then Adak, Alaska, 1970 to 1972, shore duty. Nobody believes that. A boy from Inarajan on an island in the Aleutians where the wind blows sideways nine months of the year. I ran the galley at the enlisted club. I'll tell her about Adak too. Adak was like your blizzard every day with a volcano in it.

Then 1972 to 1975, back on a ship, a tender in San Diego. 1975 the Pasayten, the oiler, 1975 to 1977, that's where I had my galley. Then 1977 to 1979, shore duty at Naval Station Guam, Apra Harbor, and I brought your father and Tessie and your Tan Chon, and your father went to school in Agat for two years and learned to swim in the harbor, and that's why he swims like a fish who is in a hurry. Then the last ship, 1979 to 1982.

That's the map, Jace. Every pin has a reason. You see? Not one raisin.

Leilani, the blizzard. You walked to chow in the snow with the light on the belt in front of you. That's good. That's how a ship sails in fog, too. You don't look at the fog. You look at the stern light of the ship ahead. That's all you need to see. Whoever's in front of you, you look at their light. And somebody's looking at yours.

Your eyelashes froze. Mine froze on the Kessling, on the fantail. I didn't tell anybody. I thought it was something wrong with me. Now I know it's the Navy.

Third Class Swimmer

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Five.**

Dear Tun,

I passed swim qual. Third class swimmer. That's the lowest kind of swimmer the Navy lets you be and still call you a sailor, and I have never been prouder of being the lowest of anything.

I was scared. I'm telling you because I couldn't tell Mom, she'd worry backward in time. I grew up four miles from the ocean, I've been in the water at Imperial Beach and Coronado and La Jolla Shores every summer of my life, Dad threw me off the jetty when I was six. But that's the ocean. The ocean holds you up. It's salty and it's alive and it pushes on your back. A pool doesn't care about you at all.

The pool building is enormous and loud. It smells so much like chlorine your eyes water before you even get in, and the sound is all bounced around, a hundred recruits and instructors yelling, and water slapping on tile, and the whistle, which echoes three times every time. The water is a perfect blue that does not exist in nature. Above the deep end there's a tower. You climb it in your coveralls, the blue ones, and you stand at the edge, and you cross your arms over your chest, one hand on the opposite shoulder, the other hand pinching your nose, and you look straight ahead, not down, and you step off. Not jump. Step. Like you're stepping off a curb. They say the ship is sinking, you have to abandon it, and this is how you go into the water so you don't hit anything.

Kaylee went before me and screamed the whole way down. Imani went before her and didn't make any sound, which was worse. When I got to the edge, the instructor, a man with a very calm mustache, said, "Look at the clock on the far wall, Recruit." I looked at the clock. It said 0942. I stepped off at 0942. I don't remember the fall. I remember the water going up my nose even though I was holding it, and the cold, and the blue all around, and then the coveralls getting heavy like they were full of wet sand.

Then you have to take the coveralls off in the water and tie the legs and swing them over your head to fill them with air and make them into a float. Did you do this? It is the dumbest and smartest thing I've ever seen. It actually works. I lay on my coveralls in the deep end for five minutes like a duck on a pillow. Then you swim fifty yards and tread water and you're done.

Afterward, in the locker room, my hair smelled like chlorine and wouldn't go into the bun, it just kept springing out, and Chief Ferrante walked by and looked at it and said "Swim qual" like a diagnosis and kept going. So I think I'm forgiven.

What I keep thinking about is, in all your twenty-two years, did you ever have to go in the water for real? Off a ship? Did anyone?

Also I miss the ocean. The real one. I miss the smell when you open the car door at the beach. I miss how it's always to the west. Here everything is to the east. The lake is east. The sun comes up out of the lake. That feels backward. It's making me dizzy.

Love,
Leilani

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded in the Malibu, parked at the top of Point Loma. February 12. Typed by Jace, in the back seat.**

Can you hear the wind? We're in the car with the windows down because I said it's not right to answer this one at the kitchen table. Jace says the wind will ruin it. If you can't hear me, read faster.

Okay. Where are we. We're at the top of the point, past the old lighthouse, at the lookout. In front of me is the whole Pacific Ocean. It's four-forty in the afternoon and the sun is low and it's putting a road of light on the water, all the way out, like you could walk on it to somewhere. The kelp is out there, dark, in long brown rafts. There's a Navy ship coming in, gray, past the buoys, with the sailors at the rail in their dress uniforms, manning the rails, all in a line. They're coming home from somewhere. I can see the lines on deck. I can see the paint is fresh on the bow and the rust is already starting under the anchor. Always under the anchor. The chain rubs it.

You said the ocean is always to the west. That's San Diego talking. Listen to me.

When I was a boy in Inarajan, the ocean was to the east. Our side of Guam faces the sunrise. You go to the back step of my father's house, you look out over the reef, and in the morning the sun comes up out of the water, red, then gold, right out of the Pacific. And somewhere out there, behind that sunrise, very far, there was America. I didn't know anything about it. I knew it was over there, past the sun.

Then I came here. And now I live on the other side of the same water. I come up here, to the point, maybe once a week. Thursdays. Don't tell your father, he thinks I go to the senior center for the bingo. I come here and I look west. The sun goes down in the water. And somewhere out there, behind that sunset, there's Inarajan. Charing is on the back step with her coffee watching the same sun come up that I'm watching go down.

It's one ocean. You see it from one side, the sun comes out. You see it from the other side, the sun goes in. That's all. That's my whole life. I went across it. I've spent most of my life on the far side looking back.

So now you're in Illinois and the sun comes up out of a lake. Don't let it make you dizzy. It's the same sun. It's just not wet.

Your question. Did I ever go in for real.

No. Not off a ship. I'm going to tell you what I saw, though, because it's the Navy and you should know.

On the Pasayten, the oiler. An oiler's job is to give fuel to the other ships while they're moving. Underway replenishment. Unrep. The other ship comes up alongside you, a destroyer or a cruiser, maybe a hundred and fifty feet away, both ships going the same speed, twelve, thirteen knots, side by side for an hour or two. And we shoot a line over to them, with a gun, a little line, and then the bigger lines go across, and then the hoses, big black hoses on a wire, and we pump the fuel across the water while the two ships go side by side through the waves.

It's beautiful. I'll tell you, it's the most beautiful thing I ever saw in the Navy. Two steel ships, three hundred, four hundred feet long each, close enough you can see the other ship's cook in his galley door having a cigarette, and the water between you is going crazy, slamming up white between the hulls, throwing spray over both decks, and you can taste it, the salt and the fuel together. The other ship's band plays sometimes. Sometimes they had a sign. "THANK YOU PASAYTEN." Sometimes a sign that's not polite.

And I was a cook. So during unrep, the galley was making sandwiches for the line handlers on deck because they couldn't come down to eat. Two hundred sandwiches. Ham and cheese. Bologna. Peanut butter for the guys who wanted it. And coffee, gallons of it, in the big jugs. I carried the sandwiches up myself sometimes. I wanted to watch.

In 1976, off the coast of Mexico, in a rough sea. A boy on the forecastle, that's the front of the ship, nineteen years old, your age, he was handling a line and a wave came over the side green, not white, green, solid water, and it took him off his feet and over the lifelines and into the sea between the two ships.

They shouted "Man overboard" and the whole ship changed in a second. Everybody knows what to do. That's what all your training is for, all the yelling, all the beds made over again. It's so when somebody is in the water you don't have to think. We threw the life rings. There's a smoke float, orange smoke, you throw it so you can see where he went. The other ship broke away, the hoses came down, the lines cut. And our ship did a turn, a special turn, I don't remember the name, the officer knew it, to come back around on the same line to where he went in. The water was all dark and white at once. And for maybe eight minutes nobody could see him.

I was at the rail with the sandwich box still in my hands.

And then a lookout saw his head. The kid had done what they taught him. He had his life jacket on, the orange kapok one they made every line handler wear. He was floating. Like you, on your coveralls, like a duck on a pillow. That's why they make you do it. That's why they make you do the dumb smart thing in the pool. He was cold and he was scared and he had swallowed about a gallon of the Pacific, but they got him. The boat went out and got him. They brought him back and the doctor put him in a blanket.

And this is the part you should know because you're going to be a sailor. That night, after the whole thing, in the galley, the boy came down. He walked into the galley in his blanket like a little old woman with a shawl, and he said, "Cruz, I heard you were on deck with the sandwiches." I said yes. He said, "Did I miss lunch?"

I made him a grilled cheese at eleven o'clock at night. I put it in the pan with butter, both sides. He ate it standing up at the steam table and then he went to bed. That's the Navy. That's the whole Navy. You go in the water, and if you're lucky you come back, and somebody makes you a grilled cheese.

His name was Thaddeus. I won't say the rest. He sent me a Christmas card for thirty years.

Now. The ship that just came in. Jace, can you see?

(Jace: They're all standing on the side.)

They're manning the rails. When you graduate, Leilani, and you go to your first ship, someday you'll come in here, under this point, and you'll be standing like that at the rail. And if you look up at the lookout, and you see a green Malibu, you wave. If I'm not here, wave anyway. Somebody's grandpa will be here.

The sun's going down now. Jace, roll up your window, it's getting cold, she knows about cold.

One more thing. You said your hair smelled like chlorine and it wouldn't go in the bun. When you get home, I'll take you to the beach and you go under, all the way under. The salt will take out the chlorine. Salt fixes everything that's wrong with fresh water.

One Grain

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Five, Sunday.**

Dear Tun,

Sunday is the only day they let us sit for more than ten minutes without a reason. We get time to write and to do laundry and to stare. I'm writing on my knee on the deck by my rack because all the desks are taken, and the floor wax smells like bananas, which I think is a chemical decision someone made on purpose to make us homesick.

Your Point Loma recording got here Thursday. Jace typed "[wind noise]" eleven times. I counted. I read it on my rack after lights out with the little red flashlight we're allowed, and when I got to the part about the boy asking if he missed lunch, I laughed into my pillow so hard Kaylee leaned over the side and whispered "are you crying" and I said "it's about a grilled cheese," and she said "oh, okay," like that made sense, and went back to sleep.

Something happened this week I want to ask you about, and I've been going back and forth on whether to.

We have heritage classes, Navy history. A petty officer with a slideshow takes us through the big battles. Coral Sea, Midway, Leyte Gulf. They want us to know what the Navy did. Then on Wednesday she put up a slide of the Marianas, 1944, and there was Guam, the little shape at the bottom with the waist in the middle, and she said "the liberation of Guam," and talked for about one minute about the landings at Asan and Agat, and then she said, "Is anyone here from Guam?"

I put up my hand. I was the only one.

She said, "Was your family there during the war?" and I said yes, and she said, "Would you like to say anything?" and I said, "No, Petty Officer," because I realized I didn't know anything to say. I know it happened. I know Liberation Day is a holiday. I've seen Tan Charing's pictures every July, the banners and the flags. But I don't know what happened to us. To our family. Nobody ever told me straight, and I never asked, because when it came up at Auntie Tessie's, people's faces changed and somebody would start talking about the potato salad.

Afterward Imani said, "You looked like you got shot." I said I felt stupid. She said, "You're not stupid, it's just your family didn't hand you the file." That's Imani. She talks like a lawyer.

So I'm asking for the file. Only what you want to give. You can say no. You were a baby, I know.

Also, completely different subject: I've gained four pounds. All muscle, I think, or all brown gravy.

Love,
Leilani

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table. February 19. Typed by Jace. This one is for the family page only. Not for Auntie Tessie to forward to the cousins. Tun's orders.**

I'm not going to say no.

I'll say what I know. It's not a lot. It's what my nana and my tata gave me, and I'll give it to you the way they gave it to me, which is short.

I was born in October 1941. Two months later the war came to Guam. The Japanese came in December, right after Pearl Harbor, and they stayed for two years and seven months. So I was a baby in it, then a little boy in it. I don't remember anything. Not one thing. Everything I'm telling you is what I was told.

My father worked for the Japanese because everybody had to work. In the fields, growing food that they took. My mother kept the house with three children, me the youngest. There wasn't enough to eat. There was a lot of fear. Some people were hurt, some people were killed. Our family was not killed. That's the first thing she always said, and I'll say it first to you. Our family was not killed.

In July of 1944, when the Americans were coming, the soldiers made the people in our part of the island walk to camps. Ours was Manenggon, in the valley by the river. Thousands of people. They walked, with whatever they could carry, in the rain, because July is the rainy season. My mother carried me on her hip. I was not yet three. My father carried a sack of rice on his shoulder and a tin of salt and my grandmother's sleeping mat. My sister, Charing's older sister, Tan Fina who passed, she was seven and she carried the pot. That's what she told me before she died. She said, "I carried the pot the whole way and I never once put it down."

They were in the camp for some weeks. It was mud and rain and very little food and sickness, and people being brave and people being afraid. My mother never told me more about the camp than that. When I asked, when I was a teenager and smart-mouthed, she said, "We were there, then we were not there." That's all. Then the Marines came through the valley, and the people walked out, and they walked home, and some of the homes were there and some were burned. Ours was standing, mostly. My father had to fix the roof.

And on Guam, every year after, the twenty-first of July, there's a parade in Hagåtña, on Marine Corps Drive. Liberation Day. Charing marched in it with the girls' school when she was little, she rides in it now with the seniors in a truck with a banner, she waves like a queen. You've seen the pictures.

One more piece. In 1978, when I had the shore duty on Guam and your father was eleven, I drove my mother up to Yona one Sunday in the station wagon we had then, a brown one with wood on the sides. She asked me to. She didn't say why. We went down the road toward the river and she told me to stop by a stand of bamboo, and she got out and stood there in her house dress and her rubber slippers, with the cicadas going so loud you had to raise your voice, and the river was brown and quick from the rain. She stood maybe five minutes. I stayed by the car. Then she walked over to a guava tree at the edge of the road and picked four guavas, and put them in her purse, and got back in, and said, "The bamboo got big." That's what she said about the valley. We drove home and she gave the guavas to your father and Tessie and they ate them in the back seat and got the seeds everywhere.

That's the file. It's thin. I'm sorry it's thin. I asked my mother once why she didn't tell more. She said, "I want you to have the other thing." I didn't know what she meant then.

Here's what I think she meant.

My nana never let a grain of rice fall. Not one. If you dropped a grain on the table, on the floor, she picked it up and she ate it, or she gave it to the chickens, but it didn't get swept away. If you left rice in your plate she didn't yell. She just looked at the rice. Like the captain looking at the string on my jacket. My tata the same. When I left for the Navy, the morning of the bus, my mother made me red rice for breakfast, which you don't eat for breakfast, and she sat across from me and watched me eat every grain.

So when you see me at Auntie Tessie's, picking up the rice that falls off the paper plate at a party, and putting it back on my plate, and everybody laughs, "Tun, it's just rice," that's the file. That's what they handed me. They didn't hand me the war. They handed me the rice.

On the ships, in the galley, I never threw out rice. Not once in twenty-two years. Leftover rice went to fried rice the next morning. Every time. Boatwright thought I was being cheap. I let him think it.

Okay. Now I'll tell you the other thing, which she also handed me, which is how she made titiyas.

My nana had a fire outside behind the house for the big cooking. A comal on it, a flat iron pan, black, older than me. She made titiyas there in the morning, with flour, sometimes with coconut milk, sometimes with the grated coconut in it. We had a coconut grater, the kind you sit on, the little wooden stool with the iron blade at the end like a fish's tail with teeth. My job, when I was five, six, was to sit on that stool and grate the coconut. You hold the half coconut in two hands and you rub it on the teeth, round and round, and the white snow comes out into the bowl. If you go too far you get the brown skin in it and she taps your head with the spoon.

Then she'd mix the dough with her hands, soft, like an earlobe, that's what she said, the dough should feel like your earlobe. And she'd pat them out flat, round, and lay them on the comal. They puff a little. Brown spots come up. The smell of that, coconut and smoke and flour toasting, in the morning, with the roosters going and the wind coming up off the reef. Leilani, that's what a morning is. Everything else is just the clock.

So I want to tell you. You're not stupid that you didn't have anything to say in that class. You have something. You just didn't know it was the file. Next time someone asks, you can say, "My great-grandmother walked to Manenggon carrying my grandfather, and afterward she never let anybody waste a grain of rice." That's true. That's enough. Then you can sit down.

Jace, put the titiyas card next to the rice card on the shelf. Tan Chon's one. Hers had sugar in it. My nana's didn't. They fought about it for thirty years, my wife and my mother, by mail. I'll let you two decide.

(Jace: Can I put the camp on the map?)

Ask your father. Yes. Put it. Manenggon, in Yona, by the river. Put a small pin. Don't write anything. Just put it there so it's there.

Okay. Now the four pounds. That's good. You were too skinny. Everybody in Inarajan would have said so. Eat the gravy. It's somebody's shift.

Paper Plate, Foil Lid

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Six.**

Dear Tun,

I read the file. Thank you. I read it twice and then I folded it in four and put it inside my cover, the hat, between the fabric and the band, where some people keep a picture. Nobody can see it. I'm not supposed to keep anything in there, probably. I'm keeping it.

I said the sentence. Not in class, in the compartment, to Imani and Kaylee, when they asked what you said. "My great-grandmother walked to Manenggon carrying my grandfather, and afterward she never let anybody waste a grain of rice." Kaylee didn't say anything for a second, and then she said her great-grandpa was at the Battle of the Bulge and never ate oranges again because of something, nobody knows what. So now we know two things about each other's great-grandparents and they're both about food. Imani said, "That's every family. It's always about food." She's probably right.

Now I have to tell you about the gas chamber, which they officially call the confidence chamber, which is the most Navy name for a thing that has ever been invented.

You go in with your gas mask on, a whole group of you, into a concrete room, and there's a smell even through the mask, sweet and sharp, like pepper someone burned on purpose. The instructors are in there with their masks, and they make you do jumping jacks. With the mask on. Then they tell you to break the seal, lift it off your face, and say your name and your division out loud. Then put it back. Then they do it again, and this time you take it all the way off.

Tun, I have never felt anything like it. My face was on fire. My eyes poured. My nose poured. I mean poured. Snot down to my chin. I could not stop coughing and I had to say "Seaman Recruit Cruz, Division One-Oh-Seven" and I said it like a cat throwing up. Then they open the door and you walk out into the cold and you're supposed to keep your arms out and walk into the wind and not touch your face. Fifty recruits walking in a circle in the snow with their arms out like zombies, crying, drooling, coughing, and the snow coming down on all of it. I saw Imani's face, and she was laughing while she was crying, and I started laughing too and that made it worse.

After, Kaylee said, "That's what finadene feels like," because I had told her about the hot pepper sauce at home. I said, "No, finadene is worse, because you do it to yourself on purpose."

Mom wrote that Tano's first birthday was this weekend at Auntie Tessie's. I've been thinking about it since Wednesday. I want every detail. Who made what. Whose kelaguen was best. Who sat where. Tell me if Uncle Bert fell asleep in the folding chair again.

I'm so hungry I can taste the paper plate.

Love,
Leilani

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded on Auntie Tessie's back patio, Chula Vista, the morning after. February 22. Typed by Jace, while eating leftovers.**

I'm sitting in the same chair I sat in all day yesterday, and it's not my chair, it's Bert's, and he's inside asleep on the couch, so you have your answer.

I'll tell you the whole day. Sit down.

Saturday. Your Auntie Tessie's house. You know it, the one off East H Street with the jacaranda that drops purple on every car, and the yard that slopes so the folding tables are always a little crooked. The baby, Tano, one year old, the boss of the day in a little white shirt and a red bow tie your cousin Nida bought at the swap meet, and by noon there was red rice on the bow tie and nobody cared.

Here's how it starts, and this is the thing I want you to see, because it happens and nobody says anything.

Friday night, nobody is told anything. There's no list. Tessie doesn't send a paper around saying "you bring the chairs, you bring the ice." But Friday night at seven o'clock your father shows up with his truck and the eight-foot tables from the shipyard union hall. Nobody asked him. Your Uncle Bert has already dug the pit for the grill and filled the coolers. Mrs. Marcelina next door, the lady with the roses, she has put her own chairs out on her driveway because she knows. Then the Taimanglo boys from down the street come with their pop-up tent and put it up and leave, they don't even stay for the party, they just know Tessie will need shade and they have a tent. Nida's friends from the dental school are in the kitchen with their hair up at nine o'clock at night rolling the shrimp patty dough.

Saturday morning, early, I go over at six because somebody has to do the rice, and when I get there, there are already four rice cookers on the counter, all different families' cookers, with tape on them saying whose. The Mendiola cooker. The Sablan cooker. The Quichocho cooker, from your Tan Chon's cousins in Spring Valley. Nobody was asked. They come with their cookers like they're reporting for duty.

There's a word for that. You know it. Inafa'maolek. People translate it, "making things good for each other," something like that. That's all right. But it's not a word you say. Nobody yesterday said it once. It's what your father's truck does on Friday night. Okay. That's the whole explanation. I'm not going to say more.

Now. The food. Jace, show her the pictures when she can see them. He took eighty pictures and put them in the family page and wrote under every one. I read them. He wrote "chicken" under the chicken.

So. The plate. A paper plate, a good one, the heavy kind, but not heavy enough, so everybody holds it with two hands like a baby. I'm going to go around it like a clock.

At twelve o'clock, the red rice. Mine, and the Quichocho rice, which is fine, and the Mendiola rice, which has peas in it, which is a choice. Mine was the reddest. I'm not being proud. I'm being accurate.

At two o'clock, the kelaguen. Three kinds. Chicken kelaguen, the main one, the chicken grilled first on the coals so it has the smoke, then chopped fine, with lemon, a lot of lemon, onion, salt, the little hot peppers, and grated coconut to make it soft. Then shrimp kelaguen that Nida's mother-in-law made, which was very good, I told her it was good, and she said "your face says too much lemon," and I said, "Ma'am, there's never too much lemon," and we've been friends since. And beef kelaguen from your Uncle Bert, which he makes too dry every year and every year somebody tells him and every year he says, "That's how my father made it." That's how his father made it too dry.

At four o'clock, the short ribs. Off the grill. Bert marinated them two days in soy and garlic and onion and sugar and black pepper and something he won't tell. Black at the edges, sticky. The smoke from that grill went down the whole street. People driving by slowed down. A car of high school kids actually slowed down and the driver yelled "Is that a party?" and Tessie yelled "Yes!" and they kept going. They should have stopped. We'd have fed them.

At six o'clock, chicken kadon. That's mine. My nana's way. Chicken pieces browned, then onion, garlic, then water and coconut milk, simmered until the meat falls off when you look at it. A little achote in it so it's gold, not white. I made it in the restaurant pan, the big steel one I took when I retired. I didn't take it. They gave it to me. Write "they gave it to me," Jace.

At eight o'clock, the shrimp patties. Fried, golden, with the little tails sticking out. The kids eat these like chips.

At ten o'clock, titiyas. Two kinds, flour and coconut. And here's the news: your mother made the coconut titiyas. Annette. With Tan Chon's card, the one with sugar. And they were good, Leilani. I said, "Annette, these are your mother-in-law's titiyas," and she cried a little in the kitchen and then she got mad at me for making her cry with flour on her hands.

And in the middle of the plate, where the clock hands are, the finadene. Everybody has their own little cup of it. Soy sauce, lemon, vinegar, onion, the red peppers, they float like boats. You put it on everything. The rice, the ribs, the chicken. You were right to tell your Kaylee it's worse than the gas, because it is, and you do it on purpose, and you do it again.

And then dessert, which I didn't eat because I'm diabetic, which I'm not, I'm just saying that to your mother who's listening.

Here's what happened with the people.

When I came in, at six in the morning, nobody was there but Tessie and the rice cookers. But when everybody came, at eleven, at noon, they came to me first. All the little ones. Nida's kids, the Quichocho grandkids, the Sablan babies, the great-nephews. They line up. They don't know they're lining up, they just do it. One by one they take my hand and bend and put their nose to the back of it. Nginge'. And I say, "Dios ti ayuda," the old way. God help you, it means. It's what you say back. Some of the little ones don't know the words yet. One of them, Danica's boy, four years old, he took my hand and sniffed it like a dog sniffs a fence post and said, "You smell like chicken." I said, "That's because I'm a chicken." He believed me. He told everybody.

I counted. Twenty-three noses before noon. My hand was wet.

Then later, when Tano was going to bed, his mother brought him over in his red bow tie with rice on it, and she took his little hand and touched it to my nose instead. Backward. For a baby, that's how you start. You give them the elder's nose, before they can bend. He grabbed my nose and pulled it. Everybody laughed. Tano didn't laugh. He was very serious about my nose.

At the end of the day, this is the thing that will happen at your party when you come home. Tessie wraps plates. Every plate gets foil on it. A plate for Mrs. Marcelina with the roses. A plate for the Taimanglo boys who brought the tent and didn't stay. A plate for the man across the street who complained about the music two years ago, so he won't complain this year. A plate for your father to take to the guys on his shift Monday at the yard. A plate for me, which I said I didn't want and took home anyway. And there was one plate she wrapped and wrote on the foil with a black marker, LEILANI, and put in the back of her freezer. She said, "It'll be there in four weeks." It'll be freezer burned. You'll eat it. It's somebody's shift.

That's the day. Your Uncle Bert is snoring. I can hear it through the sliding door. Jace says it's going to be in the recording. Good.

Familian

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Seven.**

Dear Tun,

The plate in Auntie Tessie's freezer is the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing before Kaylee's lawnmower. I've decided I'm going to eat it frozen, standing in her kitchen, with my fingers, like a popsicle. Tell her not to defrost it. I'll know.

Big news. We got phone calls. Five minutes each, on Sunday, Chief Ferrante's decision, because the division passed the last inspection with zero Irish pennants. I called home. Mom answered and cried for one minute, Dad got on and said "you okay, you okay" and then gave the phone to Jace because he couldn't think of anything else to say, which is the most Dad thing in history. Jace talked fast for two minutes about the family tree.

He's stuck, Tun. He has the Cruz line, you and Tan Chon, Dad and Auntie Tessie and us. He has Mom's side, the Salas family, Grandma and Grandpa Salas in Chula Vista and all the cousins in Tijuana, because Mom had a list already, typed, with birthdays. He says the Salas side is "easy, they write everything down." But on our side he says every time he asks you about somebody you say a name and then a second name, and the second name isn't a last name, and he doesn't know where to put it. He said you told him your mother was "Familian Medio Galon." He said, "Leilani, I don't know what box that goes in." He sounded actually stressed. I told him I'd ask you.

So I'm asking you. What's a familian? What are we? And why does Tan Charing, when she calls, always say "tell them you're Tres Minutos on the Cruz side and Medio Galon on your great-grandma's," like it's a password?

Here, this week, we did line handling and knots. Marlinspike seamanship, which sounds like a disease. The instructor had a rope as thick as my wrist and a bollard bolted to the floor, a fake one, and we learned the bowline, the clove hitch, the round turn and two half hitches. He kept saying "the rabbit comes out of the hole, around the tree, back down the hole." I could not get the rabbit to go down the hole. My rabbit kept going around the wrong side of the tree. Kaylee got it first try, because her dad has a boat on Lake Erie. Of course he does. I got it on the eleventh try and the instructor said "There's the rabbit," and I swear I almost cried. Boot camp is making me cry about rabbits.

The rope smelled like tar and old pennies. My palms are raw.

Also, Imani asked me why my name is Hawaiian if I'm Chamorro. I didn't know what to tell her. "My mom liked it" didn't seem like enough.

Love,
Leilani
P.S. Tell Jace I said he's doing a good job. I didn't say it on the phone. I should have.

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table, with Jace's computer open and the tree on the screen. March 1. Typed by Jace, who is NOT stressed.**

He's stressed. Look at his face. Okay. We're going to fix the tree.

On Guam, Leilani, there are last names, and there are families. The last name is what's on your passport. Cruz. There are thousands of Cruzes on Guam. If you go to a party in Dededo and say "I'm a Cruz," people will just nod. That's not information. That's like saying "I'm a person."

So the old people, a long time ago, they started calling each family by a name, usually after somebody, an ancestor, a great-great-grandparent, somebody with a nickname, or a job, or something funny that happened. And that's your familian. Your clan, people say in English. It means, which Cruzes. It means, whose people.

My father's line. We're Familian Tres Minutos. Three minutes. Because back four, five generations, there was a Pedro Cruz in Inarajan, a fisherman, who could stay underwater for three minutes, that's the story, and everybody in the south knew him for it. They called his children "the Tres Minutos," and then their children, and their children. Charing believes the three minutes. My father said Pedro also had eleven children and that's the real reason everybody knew him. Maybe both.

My mother's line, her family was Familian Medio Galon. Half a gallon. After some old Francisco, I don't know which one, who made the best tuba, the coconut toddy, and would only ever sell you half a gallon, so you had to come back the next day. Everybody went to his house. That's what my mother said, she laughed when she said it.

And your Tan Chon's family, from Yona. Familian Llavero. The key keeper. Her great-great-grandfather was the man who kept the keys to something, she said. Nobody knows what.

So you, Leilani, you're Tres Minutos through me, and Llavero through your Tan Chon, and Medio Galon through my mother. And Salas through your mother, but the Salas don't do clans, they do birthdays, they're better at it.

Now. Why it's a password. Because on Guam, when you meet an older person, they don't ask you your name. They ask you who your mother is. Then who her mother is. Then they find the familian. And then they say, "Oh! So you're my cousin." Because on Guam everybody is your cousin, if you go back far enough, and they go back far enough. So Charing is giving you the password so if you ever go to Inarajan without me, and an old lady at the store asks who you are, you say Tres Minutos and Medio Galon and Llavero, and the old lady will give you a mango and tell you a story about my father that is probably not true.

There was a man in Inarajan when I was young, Tun Bilo, everybody called him the Three Clans. He would say he was from three different clans depending on which party had the best food. Monday he was Tres Minutos, Wednesday he was Medio Galon, Saturday he was whoever was killing a pig. Everybody knew. Everybody fed him anyway. That's Guam.

Okay, Jace. The box.

(Jace: There's no box for clan. There's first name, last name, born, died, place, and notes.)

Then we make one. Can you make a box?

(Jace: I can add a label. "Familian." Like a tag.)

Good. Do that. And put it on every person. Me: Tres Minutos. My father: Tres Minutos. My mother: Medio Galon. Your Tan Chon: Llavero. Your father: Tres Minutos, Llavero. You and Leilani, put all three, and Salas. Your Auntie Tessie, put all three, and then put the Mendiola, because she married one, and when you marry on Guam you get the in-law's familian as a gift, like a toaster.

(Jace: Then the tree's going to have a lot of colors.)

That's right. It's supposed to. The Navy has a lot of colors too. The flags, you know. There's a flag for every letter. You put them up on the halyard in a row, and they spell something. A family is like that. Every flag by itself is just a flag. You hang them in a row, then somebody far away with binoculars can read it.

And you have to let Charing see it. Not change it, she'll delete everybody she doesn't like. Make her the kind who can look. Jace, can you do that?

(Jace: Already did. She's view only. She already complained that she can't fix Tan Fina's birthday.)

Then fix Tan Fina's birthday. What does she say it is?

(Jace: April 3, 1937.)

It's April 3. She's right. Charing is always right about birthdays. Fix it.

Now, Leilani. Why your name is Hawaiian.

Your mother and father went to Maui on their honeymoon. They stayed in a little hotel by the water and there was a lady at the desk named Leilani and she was nice to your mother, she gave her a flower for her hair every morning, the white one, plumeria. Your mother said, "If I have a girl." That's the story your mother tells. It's a nice story.

But here's what I said when you were born. I said, "Good." Your Tan Chon wanted to call you Concepcion after herself, and your mother said no, and there was a week of nobody talking to each other in the hospital in Chula Vista, and I came in with the kelaguen and I said, "Leilani is a Pacific name. It's from our ocean. Same ocean. The Hawaiians are our cousins if you go back far enough, and you can go back far enough." And Tan Chon ate the kelaguen and said, "Fine, but the second name is Concepcion." That's why your second name is Concepcion. You knew that. Now you know whose fault it is.

So tell your Imani: her grandfather said it's an ocean name. That's enough.

The rope. The rabbit. You know what I learned the bowline for? Not on the deck. In the galley. When the sea got heavy, the big pots on the range would slide. We had rails on the range, fiddles they call them, but in a really bad sea, Boatwright would tie the stockpot handles to the rail with line so the soup didn't end up in the overhead. Bowline. Every time. Because a bowline doesn't slip and it comes undone when you want it to, even after it's wet and greasy and pulled tight all night. That's the only knot that will let you go when you ask it to.

I tied a bowline on the soup pot in the Bering Sea in 1970, on the way up to Adak on a supply ship, and the ship rolled forty degrees, and every pot in that galley flew except mine. The soup was navy bean. I'll never forget it. Navy bean, swinging on a rope.

Your palms are raw. Mine were raw for my whole first year. Put the hand cream on at night, the one they give you. Then put your socks on your hands. Yes. Socks on your hands. Your Tan Chon taught me that. Kaylee will laugh at you. Then she'll ask you for a sock.

Jace, tell her the other thing.

(Jace: I'm doing the clans in the tree with a color each. Tres Minutos is blue, Medio Galon is yellow, Llavero is red, Salas is green.)

Why is Tres Minutos blue?

(Jace: Because of the Navy.)

Okay. That's the right reason. Leave it. And when your sister gets her first ship, you give her a little extra blue, a different blue, the color the water is off Inarajan in the dry season, so Charing can look at the tree and see which flag is hers.

Fire Party

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Eight.**

Dear Tun,

Socks on the hands works. Kaylee laughed for one whole night. On the second night she asked me for a sock. On the third night half the compartment was asleep with socks on their hands like a room full of puppets. Chief Ferrante walked through on her rounds and stopped and looked and didn't say a word. In the morning she said, "I see the Cruz method has spread." I don't know how she knew it was me. She knows everything.

This week was firefighting. I need to tell you about it while my hair still smells like it.

There's a building that is basically a fake ship, made of steel, black on the inside from years of fires. They set real fires in it. Diesel in a pan, and something else for the smoke. Before you go in you put on the whole outfit, the heavy coat and pants that smell like the last hundred recruits, the boots, the hood, the helmet, the gloves that make your hands into oven mitts, and the breathing mask with the tank on your back. You can hear yourself breathe in the mask, loud, like a scuba diver in a movie. Every breath sounds like a decision.

They put us in hose teams. Four or five people on one hose. The person at the front with the nozzle is the nozzleman. Behind them, people holding the hose up so it doesn't kink and so the nozzleman doesn't get thrown backward by the pressure. It's like holding a giant angry snake made of water.

I was nozzleman on the second fire.

We went in through a hatch, low, crouching, and inside it was dark except for the fire, which was orange and loud. I didn't know fire was loud. It roars, and it eats air, you can feel it pulling at you. The heat came through all those layers like the layers weren't there. Sweat ran into my eyes inside the mask and I couldn't wipe it. The instructor was right behind me, his hand on my shoulder tank, yelling in my ear: "Fog pattern! Sweep! Sweep low!" And I opened the nozzle and the water came out in a wide spray, a fog, and the steam came back at us white and hot, and I swept it back and forth across the base of the fire, and the instructor kept saying "Low, low, low," and it went out. It went out under me. The orange just went down and turned black and hissed, and the room was full of steam and the smell of wet char.

Then we backed out, and I stood outside in the snow with the mask off and the steam coming off my coat into the cold like I was a pot.

I keep thinking about the scar on your wrist. The shiny one, the size of a quarter, on the inside of your left wrist. You told me when I was little it was from a shark. You told Jace it was from a motorcycle. What is it actually from?

Also: in the hose team, we had to call out to each other the whole time. "Nozzleman ready!" "Hoseman ready!" Over and over, so everybody knows everybody is still there. It sounded like a song by the end.

Love,
Leilani, who has put out a fire

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table. March 5. Typed by Jace. He sang. I typed the song.**

It's from a fire. Not a shark. Not a motorcycle. I never rode a motorcycle in my life, I rode one time on the back of Johnny Aguon's in Yokosuka and I kept my eyes closed.

You put out a fire. I'm so proud of you I made Jace write it on the calendar. "Leilani put out a fire." It's on the refrigerator in red pen.

So. The wrist.

1968. The carrier. I'm a steward first class now, I've got eleven men under me in the officers' galley, the forward wardroom. The carrier is big, Leilani, it's like a city. It's thousands of men. There are galleys everywhere, the crew's galleys, the chiefs', the officers'. Ours made the meals for the forward wardroom, a hundred and some officers, three times a day, and the night meal for the pilots. We're in the Gulf of Tonkin. Hot. The water out there is green-brown and flat as a tabletop and the air is so wet you sweat standing still, and the galley is ninety-five, a hundred degrees all day. The steel is hot to touch. The deck is steel tile, red, slick with steam.

There was a deep fryer. Big one, built in, for the french fries and the fish. And a young steward, his second week, a Filipino boy from Cavite, eighteen, he was frying fish for the pilots' night meal, and he was tired, we were all tired, and he turned to answer me, I'd asked him something, I don't even remember, and the oil was too hot and it caught. The whole fryer, up, like a sheet. All at once. A grease fire goes up to the overhead, Leilani, it goes straight up and rolls along the ceiling, and the smell is the worst smell you'll ever smell, burned fish and burned oil and the paint on the overhead starting to bubble.

Here's the thing. Grease fire, you don't put water. Water on a grease fire explodes it. You know that, they told you. And the boy, he grabbed for the water. He grabbed a pitcher from the steam table. I saw him grab it.

I got his arm. That's all. I didn't do anything brave. I got his arm and pulled it down and the water went on the deck instead and on my wrist, and the oil was spitting, a drop of it came off the fryer onto my wrist when I reached over him. That's the scar. A drop of fish oil. Not a shark.

And then Pacifico Lagman. He was on the carrier too, by then, same as me, we'd been together on the Kessling and then got sent to the same carrier, the Navy did that sometimes by accident. Pacifico is behind us and he has the big lid. The steel cover for the fryer, it's on a hinge, and he slams it down, bang, and the fire goes out under the lid because there's no air. And then he hits the system, there was a chemical system over the fryer, a big lever, and it sprays this white foam. Everything white. The boy, me, the deck, the eggs on the counter for the next morning. White foam on everything like we were in a snow.

Then the fire party comes running. The damage control men. With their hoses and their masks and their tanks, like you. They come in shouting, and they look around, and it's out, and there's three stewards standing there covered in foam, and one of them, a big man from Louisiana, he looks at us and says, "Y'all cooking or y'all fighting?" And Pacifico says, "Both, sir." And the man from Louisiana laughs so hard he has to sit on the deck.

Twenty minutes later we were frying fish again. Different fryer. The pilots had to eat. The pilots always had to eat. They flew at night and they came down at two in the morning and they wanted fish and fries and coffee, and you made it, because a man who just landed a plane on a ship in the dark, he should get his fish.

The boy from Cavite cried in the storeroom. I let him. Then I gave him a job peeling potatoes for an hour, away from the fryer, so his hands had something. I didn't yell at him. Nobody had to. Next week he was the most careful man on the fryer I ever saw. He became a chief, later. I heard.

So that's the wrist. When you see it, it's just Pacifico's lid and a Cavite boy who became a chief.

Now. You said the hose team called out to each other, over and over, so everybody knows everybody's still there. And it became a song.

Okay. In the galley it was the same. In a galley you call out. "Behind!" when you walk behind somebody with a knife. "Hot!" when you carry a pan. "Corner!" at a corner. You call so nobody turns into you. Pacifico and me, on the Kessling, in that little pantry, we made it into a song. We'd sing it in the morning when we were tired, to wake up, the two of us, in English and a little bit of Chamorro and a little bit of Pampanga, which I never understood, he never understood my part either. I'll sing you the English part. Jace, don't laugh. Don't type that I'm off key.

*Hot pan coming, mind your back,*
*coffee's black and the sea is black,*
*eighteen eggs and the bow goes down,*
*hold the rail, nobody drowns.*

*Corner, corner, coming through,*
*one for me and one for you,*
*and when the captain rings his bell,*
*Pacifico, we did it well.*

That's it. There were more verses, they were not polite. Pacifico made up the last line. I made up "nobody drowns." We sang it for four years.

He passed in 2011, Pacifico, in Long Beach. His granddaughter called me. She said he used to sing a song in the kitchen and nobody knew it, did I know a song about eggs? I sang it for her on the phone. She cried. She wrote it down. Now you have it too. Jace is saving it in the family recordings with the words under it. So now there's three families who have that song. Hers, ours, and the Navy's, which doesn't know it has it.

What else. Your hair smells like fire. Mine smelled like fish oil for twenty-two years. Your Tan Chon said when she married me she married a frying pan. Then she'd smell my neck anyway.

Nozzleman ready. Hoseman ready. That's a good song too. Keep singing it. When you're in the Navy, you're always on a hose team, even when there's no fire. Somebody's in front of you with the nozzle. Somebody's behind you holding the line up so it doesn't kink. You call out. They call back. That's how you know.

Numbered

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Eight, late.**

Dear Tun,

This is going to be a short one and not a funny one, and I'm sorry.

Imani got hurt. A stress fracture in her shin, from the running and the marching. She'd been limping for a week and not telling anybody because she didn't want to get set back. Kaylee and I knew. We were carrying her a little, on the march to chow, one on each side, like we used to lift her out of the rack, except now it wasn't a joke. Then on Tuesday she couldn't stand up at reveille. They took her to medical and she came back on crutches and a paper that said she has to heal before she can finish, which means she's going to a different division when she's better, behind us. She won't graduate with us. She'll graduate weeks later with strangers.

She packed her seabag on Wednesday. She was so calm it was worse. She gave me her little scissors, the ones for the Irish pennants. She said "you're the thread cutter now." Then a petty officer walked her out and the door shut and that was it. Her rack is stripped now. The mattress has a fold in it where she slept.

And then on Thursday I got screamed at by Petty Officer Dewitt for something stupid, my locker wasn't squared, and I don't even care about the locker, but I stood there while he screamed and I could feel my face doing the thing it does, and I didn't cry, but it was close. I said "Aye, Petty Officer" and fixed it and then I went into the head and stood in a stall for two minutes and just breathed.

So I'm asking for a story. A good one. Tell me how you met Tan Chon. You always say "at the dance" and then Dad starts laughing and you two never finish it. I want to hear the whole thing. I want to think about something that isn't this building.

Also, I've been thinking about how she wrote you when you were at sea. Dad told me once she wrote every single day. Is that true? How did you get them on a ship?

Love,
Leilani

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table, in his good shirt. March 8. Typed by Jace. He said put on a good shirt for this one.**

I'm sorry about your friend. I'll say this one thing and then I'll tell you the story.

She gave you the scissors. On a ship, the person who leaves gives somebody the thing. Always. Pacifico gave me his scissors when he went to shore duty in 1964. A sailor leaving a division is not a sailor leaving the Navy. She's still in. She's just on a different ship for a while. Write her when you can. Ships come back to the same port.

And the Petty Officer who yelled. He's doing his job. Tomorrow you square the locker so square that he has to find something else to yell about. That's your revenge. That's the only revenge in the Navy. Do it so well that they run out of things.

Now. Your Tan Chon.

1965. I'm on shore duty in San Diego, at the officers' club on the base, running the dining room, I'm a second class steward, I'm twenty-three, I'm handsome. You've seen the pictures. Jace, find the one, the one at the beach with the hat. There. Put it in the family page under the story when you type it. Is that me? That's me. Look at the arms. That's from carrying trays.

There was a hall in National City then where the Guam people had their dances. The people from Guam who were in San Diego, the Navy families, a lot of them in National City, in Chula Vista, by the base. Somebody rented the hall and somebody brought a record player and somebody's uncle played the guitar, and they had dances on Saturday nights. Chamorro songs, and then Elvis, and then Chamorro songs again so the old people wouldn't leave.

Your Tan Chon. Concepcion Taitague from Yona, Familian Llavero, twenty years old. She had come to San Diego to keep house for her older brother, who was a Navy machinist's mate. She was very serious. She wore a green dress with white flowers on it, a dress she made, and she sat by the wall with her brother's wife and she didn't dance. She was watching the dancers like she was grading them.

I asked her to dance. She said, "What do you do?" Like that. Before yes or no. I said, "I'm a steward in the Navy." And she said, "Good, then you know how to carry a plate without spilling. Let's see if you can carry me."

Leilani. I could not dance. I had been on ships for five years. On a ship you walk wide, feet apart, knees soft, because the deck moves. On a dance floor that doesn't move, you walk like that and you look like a crab. I stepped on her foot four times in one song. It was a cha-cha. She counted out loud. "One, two, cha cha cha. One, two, you're on my foot."

At the end of the song she said, "You dance like the floor is rolling." I said, "On a ship it is." She said, "We're not on a ship." I said, "Not yet." She laughed. She had a big laugh, like a door slamming. Everybody turned around.

That's the part your father always laughs at. "Not yet." He says it's the corniest thing a man ever said. It worked. We were married in eleven months. That's the story.

No, Jace, that's not the whole story. Okay.

The whole story is she made me take dance lessons from her brother's wife in their kitchen in Imperial Beach every Sunday for three months before she'd go to another dance with me. Kitchen floor, linoleum, yellow. The brother's wife, a tough woman from Agat, she put a broom handle across my back so I would stand up straight. A broom. I danced with a broom for three months. And when I finally took your Tan Chon to the next dance, I didn't step on her once, and she said, "Now you dance like a man on land." That's when I knew.

Now. The letters. Yes. It's true.

Every day. Every day I was at sea, for sixteen years of being married at sea, she wrote. And she numbered them. In the top corner. Number one, number two, all the way up. Each cruise she started over at one. The first cruise after we were married, on the carrier, she got up to two hundred and four.

You asked how. The mail doesn't come every day on a ship. It comes when it comes. Sometimes a helicopter brings it, sometimes the oiler brings it when you refuel, sometimes you don't get any for three weeks and then you get it all at once when you come into port. In Subic, in Yokosuka, there'd be a mail call on the pier and the mailman would call "Cruz!" and hand me a stack of letters tied with a string, thirty, forty, all at once. And they were never in order. Number fifty-two on top, then number thirty, then number fifty-one. Some came in a different bag on a different day. Some came after the ones that came after them.

That's why she numbered them. So I'd know. She said, "If you have forty-nine and fifty-one, you know there's a fifty, so you don't worry, it's just slow. You only worry if a whole week is missing." She thought about everything. She was a Navy wife, you know what that is? She had two babies, your father and Tessie, and the bills, and the car that broke, and her mother in Yona who was sick, and the typhoons on Guam that she couldn't do anything about, and she did it all and she wrote every day and she numbered it.

I'd sort them in my rack, in the little bunk light, in order. Then I'd read one a day. Even if I had forty, I'd read one a day, in order, so it was like she was writing every day. Pacifico thought I was crazy. He read all his in one night and then he had nothing.

What did she write? Nothing. That's the beautiful thing. "Vicente lost a tooth. Tessie ate a crayon. The car made the noise again. I made kadon and it was too salty because I was thinking about you. Your mother wrote and says the shutters need paint. I went to the dance at the hall and I sat by the wall. Number one hundred and twelve."

She sat by the wall every time I was gone. Every time. She told me she didn't dance with anybody else in sixteen years. I asked her once, "Not once?" She said, "I danced with the broom."

Okay. So here's what I'm going to do, because you're in a bad week.

Jace, give me the paper.

I'm numbering. This recording is number one. Every one I send you from now till you graduate, I'm going to number. Ask Jace to put the number on the top of the page. So if they get there out of order, at your mail call, you'll know. You'll know there's one coming even when it's late.

(Jace: But there's only like two more weeks.)

Then she'll get to number four. That's still a number.

And you number yours. Start now. Put a one on the next one. That way, when you're on a ship someday, and you write home, you'll already know how. Your mother will know. And me.

She passed in 2020, your Tan Chon. You were thirteen. You remember. She was sick a short time and then she was gone, and it was the year when nobody could come to anything, and we had nine people at the cemetery standing apart. It was a bad year to lose somebody. Every year is a bad year to lose somebody.

I'm not going to be sad on this. She'd tap my head with the spoon. I'm going to tell you she was the strongest person I ever met including every chief in the United States Navy. When I was at sea, the house didn't miss me, because she was there. I was proud to come home to her house. I was a visitor in her house for sixteen years, and then I retired and I was a visitor for thirty-eight more. She let me make red rice on Sundays and nothing else. Her kitchen.

Now, the locker. Square it. Square it like a woman with a broom is standing behind you.

Number one.

Chipping Hammer

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Nine. Number 1.**

Dear Tun,

Number one. I wrote it in the corner the way you said. It looks official. It looks like a form.

I squared the locker. I squared it so hard that on Friday's inspection Petty Officer Dewitt opened it and stood there for a long time and then reached in and moved my folded skivvy shirt a quarter inch to the left, just so he'd have done something, and then closed it and moved on. Kaylee saw it. She said, "He had to invent a problem." I said that's my grandfather's revenge. She said, "Your grandfather is kind of terrifying." I said yes.

I have something I've been not telling you, and I've decided this is the week, because we're almost done and I don't want to walk across that drill hall at graduation with it in my pocket.

You know my rating is Aviation Electrician's Mate. AE. Avionics, wiring, electrical systems on aircraft. I'm going to A school in Pensacola after this. You know all that, you came to the swearing in at the processing station downtown, you shook the hand of the officer and told him his shoes needed a shine.

What you don't know is that when I first sat down with the recruiter, a year ago, at the office on Highland, he looked at my paperwork and saw "grandfather, retired Navy, MSC" and he said, "Oh, a chief cook, that's great, you know, Culinary Specialist is a fantastic rating, you'd be a natural." And he had the brochure out already. He meant it nice. And I said no. I said it so fast that he put the brochure away like it was hot. Then I said I wanted something with electrical. And he found me AE.

And I've been worrying ever since that if you knew I said no to the cooking, you'd think I was saying no to you. That I was ashamed of it. I'm not. I want you to know I'm not. I think about your thirty-two pounds every night. I just didn't want to walk through the door because somebody said the door had my name on it. I wanted to pick the door.

I didn't know how to say that without it sounding like what it sounds like. So I'm just writing it fast.

Also, our division is the best in our group at drill now. We do the turns and the marching in the drill hall and the sound of all our boots hitting the floor at once is like a door slamming, which is how you described Tan Chon's laugh, so now every time we hit the halt I think of her.

Love,
Leilani

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table, then in the driveway. March 11. Number 2. Typed by Jace.**

Leilani Concepcion Cruz.

You think I didn't know? I knew. That recruiter on Highland, he's a nice boy, his auntie is a Sablan, she told Tessie, Tessie told me in about four minutes. I've known for a year. I was waiting to see when you'd say it.

I'm going to tell you something and I want you to read it slow.

I cooked so somebody could choose.

That's the whole thing. That's why I stayed twenty-two years. When I got on the bus to the base in 1960, the door was open for me in one place. I went through it and I did it well. In the early seventies the Navy opened the other ratings to stewards and stopped holding the Filipino recruits to the one door, and in 1975 it put the stewards and the commissarymen together. More doors opened, and a lot of young Chamorro and Filipino men behind me went through them, radarmen, machinists, electricians, storekeepers, Johnny Aguon's own son became an officer. I didn't go through those doors. I was thirty-four by then, I had two kids, I was good at what I did, and I liked my galley. I chose my galley. That's the difference. The first time, I was sent. The second time, I chose.

So when you said no to that brochure, you weren't saying no to me. You were saying yes to what I was doing it for. That's my whole career, saying no to that brochure. I'd frame it if I could.

Electrician. On airplanes. Leilani, I'm so proud I went outside and washed the Malibu. Jace saw me. I washed it in March. In the cold.

(Jace: It was sixty-four degrees.)

That's cold for National City.

Okay. Now I'll tell you the rest of the career, since you're almost out of boot camp and you should know how a career ends.

After the Pasayten, 1977, shore duty on Guam. Naval Station, Apra Harbor. I was the leading petty officer in the enlisted galley. We lived in Navy housing on the base, and your Tan Chon was home for the first time in thirteen years, and she was so happy she cried every afternoon for a month. Not sad. She'd go to Yona and see her mother, then she'd come back and cry. That was happy crying.

And in 1979 I made chief. Chief Mess Management Specialist. MSC. The anchors. You know the anchors, they're in the hallway, in the shadow box with the ribbons, next to the lieutenant's letter.

When you make chief in the Navy, Leilani, it's a big thing. You go from a first class to a chief, and it's like a different country. Different mess, different uniform, the khakis. I had pressed khakis for officers for fifteen years, and now I was pressing my own. The first morning I put them on, I stood in the bathroom in Navy housing on Guam and I looked at my collar with the anchors on it and I didn't know what to do. So I went out to the yard and stood in the sun. That's all. The sun on Guam in the morning is a thing that knows you. Your Tan Chon came out and stood next to me, and she didn't say anything either, and then she said, "Now press your own shirts." That was the congratulation.

After that, the last ship. A cruiser out of San Diego, 1979 to 1982. My galley. The chief's job is different. You don't cook so much. You run it. The menus, the stores, the inspections, the young men. You make sure the young men don't burn themselves on the fryer. I was the old man in the galley then. They called me Chief Cruz, or Chief, or behind my back Tun, because some of the Chamorro boys called me that and it spread. A boy from Minnesota called me Tun for two years and thought it was my first name.

And I'll tell you what the galley was like then, at the end, because it's the same galley you're going to find someday when you go aboard.

Steel. Everything is steel. The deck is steel with the red tile on top, worn through in the places where the men stand at the range, and under it the steel shows through like a bone through skin. The bulkheads are steel, painted that white the Navy calls white but is a little yellow, a little gray, the color of a tooth. There's always paint drying somewhere. The smell of ship's paint, Leilani, you'll know it forever once you know it, it's oily and sharp and it gets in your clothes. Somewhere on every ship somebody is always painting, every day, because the salt is always eating.

The rust. On a ship the rust is the enemy you never beat. It comes through everywhere, at the welds, at the corners, under the fittings. Orange. It bubbles the paint from underneath like a blister, and then the paint splits and there's the rust, flaking, like a scab. And you get a chipping hammer, a little hammer with a sharp edge on both ends, and you chip. Tap tap tap tap. You knock the rust off down to the bright steel, and then the wire brush, and then the red primer, and then the gray paint, and three months later it comes back.

On the cruiser I made the galley men chip the galley overhead every Friday. One square yard each. They hated me. Tap tap tap, all afternoon, the rust coming down in their hair like orange snow, in their eyes, they had to wear goggles. And the boy from Minnesota said, "Tun, why do we do this, it just comes back." And I said, "Because it comes back."

That's the answer. That's the Navy, a family, a house on Guam, a language, a recipe, a tree on a computer. Everything comes back. The rust, I mean. The salt is always eating. So you chip. You chip because it comes back. If you stop, it doesn't stop.

I retired in June 1982. On the cruiser, at the pier in San Diego, on the fantail. A little ceremony. They piped me over the side. That's when the boatswain blows the whistle, the long high note, and you walk down the brow, that's the gangway, and you salute the flag one last time, and you're off the ship. Your father was fifteen and he was in his school clothes, the white shirt and the clip-on tie. Tessie was thirteen and she cried. Your Tan Chon didn't cry. She was holding the shadow box with the anchors and she said, when I got to the bottom of the brow, "Okay, now you're home," and she handed me the car keys. Twenty-two years. Then the car keys.

Jace, let's go out to the car.

(Jace: Why?)

I'll show her the rust.

Okay. We're in the driveway now, it's still sixty-four degrees and cold. This is the Malibu. 1978. Mint green. I bought it the year before I made chief, on Guam, almost new, from a Marine who was going home, and I shipped it back to San Diego on a Navy cargo ship when we came back, which I'm not sure I was supposed to do. It's been everywhere with me. It's been to every Thursday at Point Loma for more than forty years.

And here, Leilani, by the back wheel on the driver's side, right where the chrome strip ends. There's rust. A spot about the size of your palm. It's been there since 1985. Every spring I chip it. With my hammer from the cruiser. I took the hammer. Tap tap tap. I chip it down to the steel, I prime it, I paint it with the mint green I have to order from a man in Ohio. And every year it comes back.

I'm going to do it this weekend. Before you come home. So it'll be fresh when you see it.

Jace says I should let him do it. I said no. I said when your sister comes home she can do it. An electrician should know how to fix rust. Everybody should. Number two. You'll get one more before you march.

Ball Cap

**Seaman Recruit Leilani Cruz. Week Nine, Saturday. Number 2.**

Dear Tun,

I'm not a recruit anymore. I'm writing this in my rack with the new cap on my head, which you are not supposed to wear inside, and I don't care, I'll take it off when I hear boots.

Battle Stations. I'll try to tell it in order, but it was twelve hours and I didn't sleep, so it might come out like a stack of letters with no numbers.

They wake you in the middle of the night. They don't tell you when. Lights on, screaming, you have minutes to get your gear on and your seabag packed, and then you march in the dark through the cold to a building with a whole ship inside it. A full-size copy of a destroyer, Tun, built inside a building, sitting in water, with a pier next to it and darkness up high where the sky should be. It's called the Trayer. A ship that never leaves a building. You walk up the brow and salute and go aboard and it's real. The hatches are real, the ladders are real, the knee-knockers, those steel lips at the bottom of every door that crack your shins, are extremely real.

Then, all night, things go wrong. The speakers play explosions so loud the deck shakes. Lights go red. Smoke comes out of the vents, fake smoke but thick, you can't see your hand. Water comes in, real water, through a pipe that bursts in a compartment, and you have to go in and patch it with wooden wedges and a big clamp and a mallet while the water hits you in the chest. It's so cold. It's lake water, I think. My hands stopped working. Kaylee held the wedge and I hit it, and missed, and hit it, and missed, and then hit it, and the spray went down to a drip.

Then there was a fire. I wasn't nozzleman. I was on the hose behind, holding the line up so it didn't kink, calling out. Then a scenario where people are hurt, dummies, but heavy, and you carry them on a stretcher up a ladder, which is basically impossible, four of you, lifting a hundred and eighty pounds of rubber man up a ladder at a seventy-degree angle, while the ship is "listing" and everyone's yelling. Then we had to abandon ship. We stood at the edge and crossed our arms the way they taught us in the pool, but we didn't jump this time, they just made us stand there and think about it. That was almost worse.

By the end of it, the sun was coming up outside, I could tell because the doors opened and there was gray light, and we were so tired we were laughing at nothing. We marched into a room. They lined us up. And then, the RDCs walked down the line, and each one stopped in front of a recruit and took the RECRUIT ball cap off your head. And put a new one on. A dark blue cap that says NAVY in gold.

Chief Ferrante did mine. She put it on my head and pulled the brim straight, and she looked at me, not yelling, just looking, and she said, "Sailor Cruz." Then she said, quietly, so only I could hear, "The corner comes from the line." Tun. I never told her that. I never said that in front of her. I don't know how she knew. Maybe it's just a Navy thing. Maybe everybody's grandfather says it.

Then Petty Officer Dewitt shook my hand. He has a very dry handshake. He said, "Your locker was always square." That's it. That was the nicest thing he's ever said. I almost asked him to write it down.

And a letter came from Imani. She's on a different ship now, in her new division, her leg's healing. She said, "Tell your grandpa I'm still cutting threads, I bought a second pair of scissors at the exchange." She said she'll write when she gets her orders.

Mom says you're coming to graduation. All of you. She said you bought a coat. She said you went to the swap meet and you bought a coat and you won't tell anyone what it looks like. Please tell me what it looks like.

And Mom said you're flying. Are you okay to fly? It's a long way. It's cold. I mean really cold. I don't want you to come here and fall on the ice. I'd rather you watch it on the computer at home.

That's a lie. I want you to come.

Love,
Sailor Leilani Cruz (that's real, look)

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the kitchen table, then in the hall closet. March 14. Number 3. Typed by Jace.**

Sailor Cruz.

I'm going to say that one more time because I like it. Sailor Cruz. Okay.

First, I'm coming. Don't tell me about ice. I've been to Adak. You know what Adak is? You don't. Nobody does. I'll tell you.

1970. Adak, Alaska. An island in the Aleutian chain, way out, halfway to Russia. There's a Navy station there. No trees. Not one tree, Leilani, the whole island, they had a sign at the edge of the base, a joke sign, "Adak National Forest," with a fence around six little Christmas trees somebody planted that never grew. Just grass and rock and a volcano. Mount Moffett. With snow on the top. And the wind. They have a wind there called the williwaw. It comes down off the mountain without warning, a hundred miles an hour, and it knocks you flat. I saw it pick up a man and roll him across the parking lot like a newspaper.

I ran the galley at the enlisted club on Adak. And your Tan Chon came with me, with your father, three years old, and Tessie, a baby. We lived in Navy housing in a building that shook every time the williwaw came. She hated it. She said, "There's no sun here, Joaquin, this is a punishment." It was dark at three in the afternoon in December. She put tinfoil on the windows on the inside to throw the little light back into the room. And she grew one tomato plant, in a coffee can, on the kitchen windowsill, under a lamp. For two years. It gave eleven tomatoes. She counted. She made one kelaguen with them, she put them in with the chicken, which you don't do, but she said she was the only woman in the history of the world who grew a tomato on Adak and she was going to put it in whatever she wanted.

So don't tell me about ice. I have stood in the williwaw. I can stand in Illinois.

The doctor said I'm fine. I went on Monday. Doctor Abella. She listened to my heart and said, "Mr. Cruz, your heart is fine, your blood pressure is fine, your knees are eighty-four." I said, "My knees were in the Navy, they're used to it." She said, "Then fly." She wrote it down.

Now. The coat.

Okay, Jace, open the closet. Hold the phone up. No, I'll describe it. You can't see a closet in a letter.

It's wool. Heavy. Dark blue, Navy blue, close enough. Double-breasted. Big black buttons with an anchor on every button. It's a peacoat, Leilani. A real one, an old one. The man at the swap meet on Saturday, in National City, under a blue tarp, he had it on a hanger between a lamp and a box of tools, and I saw it from forty feet away. I knew what it was. I walked over and opened it and looked at the inside, at the collar, at the stitching, at the label. And the label said what it should say. Navy issue. 1960s. Somebody's coat. Somebody who went to boot camp maybe the same year as me.

The man wanted forty dollars. I said, "This is my coat." He said, "Sir, I just put it out this morning." I said, "No, I mean this is my coat. I had this same coat. I lost mine on Adak." Which is true, it blew away, the williwaw took it off a hook outside the club door and it went into the sea. And he looked at me and he said, "Thirty."

It fits. It smells like a closet and mothballs and something else, like old smoke. It's a little heavy on the shoulders. It's perfect. I'm going to wear it to your graduation. I'll be the oldest man there in the oldest coat and I'll stand at the front.

Your father says it's embarrassing. Your father is wearing a puffy jacket he bought at the mall that makes him look like a pillow. Who's embarrassing.

Second thing. The cap. Jace showed me a picture, the Navy put pictures on their page of the caps going on. He found your division. You're in the back row. You can see your eyebrows. That's all, just eyebrows under the brim. Your mother looked at that picture for an hour. She said, "Those are her eyebrows." Okay.

Third thing. Your Chief. "The corner comes from the line." Maybe it's a Navy thing. Maybe it's an everybody's grandfather thing. I don't know. But I like that she said it. I'd like to meet her. I want to shake her hand. If she lets me.

And now the page. Jace made a page.

(Jace: For her graduation. Where everybody leaves a message.)

Tell her who's on it.

(Jace: Mom. Dad. Auntie Tessie. Uncle Bert. Nida. Tan Charing. The Quichochos. The Salas cousins, a lot of them. Mrs. Marcelina. Danica's boy drew a picture of a chicken. Imani's mom found it somehow.)

Imani's mother. From Atlanta. She wrote, "Thank you for being with my baby when she couldn't stand up." She wrote it to your Kaylee too. And Charing. You want to hear Charing?

(Jace: Tan Charing wrote: "Håfa Adai Leilani. The shutters are painted. The mangoes are coming. You are Tres Minutos and Medio Galon and Llavero and Salas and now Navy. Come see me before I get old." She's seventy-nine.)

Before she gets old. That's my sister. She's been saying that since she was fifty.

So the page is there. You'll see it when you get your phone back. Everybody's on it. You'll read it on the plane to Pensacola. There's a lot. Don't read it all at once like Pacifico. Read one a day. In order.

Last thing. Number three is the last one. After this, I'll see your face. We'll be in the hall. I don't know which side. I'll be the one in the coat.

Jace, close the closet, the mothballs are in the phone.

Pass in Review

**Sailor Leilani Cruz. O'Hare, Gate B9, waiting for the flight to Pensacola. Number 3.**

Dear Tun,

I have my phone back. It's in my pocket right now with forty-one percent battery and two hundred and six unread messages, and I'm writing you on paper anyway, on the back of the graduation program, because that's how we talk now and I'm not ready to stop. I'll mail it from Florida. You'll get it after you're home. You'll already know everything in it. Read it anyway.

I want to write down the day before it turns into a story people tell at Auntie Tessie's and get wrong.

Friday morning. We were up at three, though we didn't have to be, nobody could sleep. Kaylee ironed her shirt four times. I did my hair in the bun so tight my eyebrows went up. Dress blues, the dark ones with the white piping on the cuffs, every crease I learned from you. We stood inspection in the compartment one last time and Chief Ferrante walked down the line and didn't touch anything. Not one thing. She got to the end and turned around and said, "Well. I guess you're done," and walked out, and we didn't know if we were supposed to laugh or cry, so we did both and very quietly.

Then the march to the drill hall. It's huge, Tun, you saw it. A ceiling so high it has its own weather. Flags from every state hanging down from the rafters in rows, and the bleachers full on both sides, and the band, and the noise. When we came in through the big doors, all the families stood up at once and it sounded like the Pacific at Imperial Beach on a winter night, a roar and then a hush and then a roar.

I looked for you. You're not supposed to look. You're supposed to keep your eyes front. I looked for about one second, and I found you, because you were in the front row on the left side, in the coat, standing up when everyone else had sat back down, at attention, with your arms straight at your sides. You were the only one standing. Dad was next to you in the pillow jacket, trying to pull you down by the sleeve, and you weren't moving. Jace was holding up his phone. Mom was holding Jace up. That's what I saw in my one second.

We marched. We did the turns. Our boots all hit the floor at once and it sounded like a door slamming, like Tan Chon. We passed in review in front of the reviewing officer and saluted. We said the Sailor's Creed all together, eight hundred people saying the same words, and my voice came out of me lower than I've ever heard it. Then they said the words that mean you're dismissed, and eight hundred people breathed out at once, and the families came down out of the bleachers onto the floor, and it was chaos, it was like a typhoon of people.

You didn't run. You walked. Like the deck was rolling. I saw you coming through all those people in your coat and you were walking wide, knees soft, and I thought, he's walking like a crab, and I started crying before you even got to me.

And then you were there. And I did it. Nginge'. In my dress blues, in the middle of the drill hall, with eight hundred families around us. I took your hand, and bent, and put my nose to the back of it, by the scar, and breathed in.

I kept my eyes open this time. I want you to know that. I kept them open on purpose.

Your hand smelled like the airplane, and that hand cream you use, and mothballs from the coat, and something else, I couldn't figure it out, and then I figured it out. Onions. Again. You chopped onions before you got on a plane to Illinois.

You said, "Dios ti ayuda, Sailor Cruz." And then you said, "You opened your eyes." And I said, "I was checking your shoes." And you looked down at them and said, "They need a shine." And Mom started laughing so hard Dad had to hold her up.

Then you saw Chief Ferrante. Across the floor, with her families coming to say thank you. And you made me walk you over. I was terrified. You walked right up to her and took off your hat and said, "Chief. Joaquin Cruz. MSC, retired. I wanted to shake your hand." And she shook it. And she looked at your coat and said, "That's an old one." And you said, "So am I." And she laughed. Tun, she laughed. Chief Ferrante. I have never once in ten weeks heard Chief Ferrante laugh. And then you asked her where she learned "the corner comes from the line," and she said, "My first chief. He said everybody's grandfather said it." And you said, "Then it got around." And she said, "Things do, Chief." She called you Chief.

I'll never forget it. I'll be on a ship someday and I'll remember the sound of her calling you Chief.

Then the lake. You asked me before we did anything else. You said, "Take me to the lake, I came to see if it's honest." So we got everyone in the rental car and drove out to the shore by the base, down a road with salt on it, white salt crunched into the pavement, the only salt anywhere near that water. And we walked out to the edge. It was so cold. Gray sky, gray water, little chunks of ice knocking against the rocks like ice cubes in a glass. Wind off the lake. You stood there in the peacoat with the collar up. You looked at it for a long time. Then you did the thing. You bent down, with your bad knees, and Dad tried to stop you, and you put two fingers in the water and touched them to your tongue.

And you said, "No salt. How does anything float?"

Jace has it recorded. He said it's going in the family page under "Tun tastes Illinois." I already know it's going to be the most played thing in there.

Then you stood up and said, "It's honest. It just doesn't have much to say."

And then, at the hotel, the plate.

I still can't believe it. You brought it. Auntie Tessie's plate, the one with LEILANI on the foil. You brought it in a cooler bag with ice packs, through the airport, through security. You told me the security man opened it and looked at the foil and said, "Sir, what is this," and you said, "It's my granddaughter's dinner from February," and he closed it and let you through. That's the second time in your life a man at a gate thought your rice was suspicious.

It was freezer burned. You were right. It was a little frosty on the top and the rice had gone a little hard at the edges and the kelaguen had given up some of its lemon. I ate it anyway. I ate it in the hotel room, sitting on the bed in my dress blues with the jacket unbuttoned, with my fingers, right out of the foil, like a popsicle, the way I promised. The red rice was still red. The short ribs were still sticky. There was a titiyas folded in the corner, one of Mom's, with sugar. Jace and Dad and Mom sat on the other bed and watched me eat like I was a show, and you sat in the chair by the window in your coat, looking out at the parking lot and the snow, and every time I picked up a grain of rice off the foil you nodded.

Every grain. I didn't drop one.

Tun, I'm going to Pensacola, and then a squadron, and then a ship someday, and I don't know where. Maybe Japan. Maybe San Diego. Maybe Guam. Put a pin when you know. Make Jace make it a good one, with a reason.

I'm keeping the numbers. This is three. I'll write four from Florida.

Your granddaughter,
Leilani Concepcion Cruz, Familian Tres Minutos, Medio Galon, Llavero, Salas, and Navy

---

**Tun Joaquin Cruz, recorded at the top of Point Loma, in the Malibu, windows down. A Thursday in April. Number 4. Typed by Jace.**

I got your number three. In blue. Your ink must be running out too.

So now you know everything that happened, and I know everything that happened, and Jace has it all in the computer. So I'm not going to tell you about graduation. I'll tell you about Thursday.

I'm at the point. Four-fifty. The sun is going down. There's a road of light on the water again, a wide one, and the kelp is out there, and a pelican just went by the car so close I saw its eye. The air smells like salt and the eucalyptus they have up here and the exhaust from the bus that brings the tourists to the lighthouse. Down below, there's a ship coming in, a gray one, a big one, past the buoys. They're manning the rails. White hats in a long line.

I waved. I don't know if anybody saw. Jace says they can't see us from down there. I waved anyway. Somebody's grandpa has to.

And I did the rust. Last weekend. The spot by the back wheel. Chipped it, primed it, mint green from the man in Ohio. I left one little corner I didn't do, by the chrome, about the size of a stamp. I left it for you. At Christmas, when you're home from Pensacola, you take the hammer from the cruiser and you chip that corner. It'll be bigger by then. It comes back. That's why I left it.

Here's the last thing, then the sun's down and Jace wants a burrito.

Somewhere out there behind the sunset, Charing is on the back step in Inarajan with her coffee, and the sun is coming up for her out of the same water. And you're in Florida, on the Gulf, which is the Atlantic's back porch, and I've only seen that water twice. So now the family is looking at the sun from three places. Next you'll be on a ship, and you'll be in the middle of it, where the sun doesn't come up out of anywhere, it just comes up, and you'll be the one with the reason to be where you are. I'll be here on Thursdays in the Malibu with the windows down, knees eighty-four, coat in the trunk, looking west, the way I have since 1982, and when you put in your number five I'll read it one day at a time, in order, like your Tan Chon taught me.