Billy Speare

You know, sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve fucked up in life, because once in a blue moon the big guy in the sky sneezes, a big-assed atchoo, and just like that, all the planets spin sweetly into alignment. The ex-wife, the alimony, the daughter who has disowned your soul—all of it bleeds to white in the glaring, awesome light of one fine day.

July 14, 2001.

Memorize that. Write it down. Scrawl it across the sky. Tattoo it on your ass.

There I sat, at the picnic table outside my fish-camp trailer—the mercury already pegged on 90, and it wasn’t yet 9:00 A.M.—drinking coffee with a bourbon back, sucking my first cig of the day, terrified at what lay before me: the New York Times Book Review. I never read reviews of my own work. And my agent is under strict orders never to mention them to me. Why would I care what a pissant wanna-be thinks? But the agent broke our rule and left a message on my voice mail. “Read it, Speare,” she said. “Just get the hell over yourself and read it.” I swear to God, I bet the woman smokes unfiltered Camels.

And Christ, I was doing it. I was following orders and letting yet another woman fuck up my day. The Sex Life of Me was my fourth novel, my best, and it damned well needed to do well. I flipped through to page 16, squinting my eyes against the cigarette smoke, my hands shaking with the premonition that I was gonna get creamed.

Hmpf. Not bad placement, above the fold, a pen-and-ink drawing that I guess was supposed to be my protagonist, Jake Harris. I clutched the paper tightly, ready to ball up the motherfucker and hurl it—all I needed was the first sign, a clause that hinted, Okay, here it comes, an unkind or stupid shot. My lips moved with the words, but my voice was soft; dread had it punched full of holes.

“Mr. William S. Speare’s genius is that he sees into the hearts and minds of even the lowliest human souls and illuminates for the reader their dark, lonely, wretched lives. The Sex Life of Me is a tour de force. We should be grateful that a writer of Mr. Speare’s ilk walks among us, for all of humanity benefits from his abundant talent.”

Shit. I took a shot of bourbon and gritted my teeth. Fucking bastard nailed me.

I reread the review, searching for the obligatory sentence that would indicate I hadn’t done this or that up to snuff. But there was no snuff. It was a goddamned rave. Everything revved: my heart rate, my breath, the speed at which I downed my shot of Wild Turkey. My brain dropped to the floor and did twenty sit-ups. I had to call my editor, then my agent, had to let my ex-wife know. Even she, after ten years of alimony battles, might be happy for me. But first, I walked down to the river, still shaking, and took a good long piss, batting back tears, breathing in deep the scent of the rich river muck, knowing that nobody could fuck with me now.

This was it. The big break. What had to happen. In the July 14, 2001, issue of the New York Times Book Review, Dr. Gordon Laughton, a professor of English literature at Duke, pinned the g word to me. It was about fucking time. It had taken ten jerk-off years and tons of blood spilled on the page before some hack reviewer found the balls to cough up the proper noun. But, hey, who’s bitching? At least it finally happened.

Later that day—after a dozen jubilant phone conversations and one argument (my ex told me I could kiss her ass and that, no, my daughter did not want to talk to me)—I took my boat downriver to check my crab traps. A small pod of dolphins—four of them, I think—cruised on by, and I noticed a skiff up ahead, bobbing real gentle like, and rising from it a set of legs crossed like silk against that hot blue sky. It was right then, let me tell you, that July 14, 2001, took me by the ears and screamed, Hey, asshole, your good luck? It’s not over yet!

She was a wisp: fifty pounds of blue eyes, the rest all sass and twat. She’d anchored just to the right of the channel. She lay back against a pink polka-dotted cushion and, with her eyes closed, sang along at the top of her lungs to Gillian Welch. She was begging for someone to burn her stillhouse down. She was tanned and freckled and had on a swimsuit small enough to fit a sparrow.

I slowed my motor to an idle, just sat there staring at her. She stopped midnote, opened them big blues, looked at me bow to stern, and asked without rancor, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

“Well, that’s a good question,” I said, taking off my ball cap and wiping the side of my face with my forearm. I repositioned the cap, settling it back on my head with a wiggle of the brim. “If I were an honest man, I guess I’d have to say I’m gazing at about the prettiest little thing I ever did see.”

“Is that right?” She sat up on her elbows, shaded her eyes. As she studied me, a bemused smirk lightened her features, solid features that—I surmised—had only just begun to suggest a life hard-lived. “So, are you?”

“Am I what?”

“An honest man?”

I cleared my throat. My balls tightened. A line of sweat eased down my cheekbone. “Hell yeah,” I said. “The most honest you’ve ever met.”

She laughed, deep and throaty. Oak-rich. Tobacco-cured. “Wanna beer?” she asked, but her flat tone and stubborn jaw suggested she was challenging me, testing to see if I’d say yes, and not to a woman I’d just met, but to the possibilities that churned dreamlike in the air between us.

I smacked a mosquito off my forearm. She smelled like tangerines. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it: My lips curled into a smart-assed grin. “Your skiff or mine?”

She tossed me a Bud. “Stay where you’re at and we’ll do just fine.”

That’s it. That’s how our love affair began. In the middle of the Matanzas River—the tide rising—she and I in separate boats.

Oh yeah. Listen to me, Jesus. Let me say this again: July 14, 2001, was the finest fucking day of my life.