Just before the four-to-eight watch came on deck it stopped, leaving behind the smell of wet wool hanging in the air and the sounds of a ship at sea. One was continuous: the river of ocean water brushing past the thin skin of the destroyer like a felt-tipped pen underlining never-ending sentences. The rest was punctuation: creaking joints, the dull throb of the main propulsion shafts, engines, reduction gears, fans, condensers, generators, exhausts, intakes, pistons, pumps, boilers, bilges, banging doors and banging plumbing, a tin cup clattering around the scullery, a muffled curse from somewhere below deck when nobody picked it up, a hundred thousand bubbles of air bursting as the two huge propellers pushed off into the sea, creating the river that brushed the hull. Astern the churning, phosphorescent wake played out, as if from a giant reel, into a starless, pitch-black night. On the open bridge the messenger of the watch, a squirrelish seaman deuce with dirt under his fingernails and blackheads sprinkled across his forehead like freckles, squatted on his haunches polishing brass plaques with navy-issue rags, elbow grease and Kool Aid granules left over from the ban on cyclamates.
