A Delirious Summer Read online

  © 2004 by Ray Blackston

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3894-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version ®. NIV ®. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.© Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  The Buzz on Flabbergasted

  “Amazing. A novel with no illicit sex, bad words, racial slurs, or crime that is simultaneously serious, hilarious, and impossible to put down.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Blackston’s first novel is refreshingly honest in its portrayal of young, single Christians. Good writing and an ample dose of humor make this as charming as Bridget Jones’s Diary from the male point of view. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Blackston’s imaginative first novel is sometimes brutally honest but always refreshingly funny.”

  —Library Journal, Best Genre Fiction 2003: Christian Fiction

  “Blackston’s tale is a zany take on twentysomething life in the shadow of the steeple—and proof that when it comes to courtin’, less can definitely be more.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Seafood, marshmallow roasts, spray-painted mosquitoes, ghost stories, and a couple of near-death experiences force reexamination of the outlook on life in the here-and-now, and life in the hereafter. Ray Blackston captures the easy ebb and flow of Southern culture—complete with all-day-singin’ and dinner-on-the-grounds—with grace and charm. He is equally adept at describing the loneliness of single life and finding humor in the absurdities of American dating rituals while weaving a healthy dose of religion and romance through both. Blackston’s light and breezy style makes Flabbergasted an ideal reading choice for a lazy summer night.”

  —Bookpage

  “If you only read one novel this summer, let this be it!”

  —Crossings Book Club main selection

  “Lad Lit with great buzz and a voice very much like Nick Hornby, Flabbergasted is well worth checking out.”

  —Bookreporter

  “With a colorful cast of quirky characters and a plot full of surprises, this is one of the feel-good novels of the year. A fun, lighthearted, and thoroughly enjoyable relational ‘gumbo’ of a novel . . . quirky and very satisfying.”

  —CCM magazine

  “A narrative in three acts, the humorous odyssey in Ray Blackston’s superb first novel unfolds through the eyes of stockbroker Jay Jarvis. Underlying Blackston’s story is the theme that God is in control, planning behind the scenes what we often perceive as detours, and leaving us flabbergasted at how he weaves unadorned surprises into life.”

  —Christian Retailing

  “Ray Blackston takes an amusing look at the Christian singles scene; the story proceeds at a leisurely, episodic pace.”

  —Romantic Times

  “What makes this novel so downright intriguing is how Blackston mixes doses of such trivial pursuits as picking a church for its singles rating, buying and selling stocks, and singles beach trips. He stirs in his mix of quirky characters and then weaves in poetry, fancy, and romance to produce a novel that resonates with reality and vitality. I was enthralled.”

  —Christian Activities Online

  “Ray Blackston hits the market with a bang. . . . Flabbergasted is a light, easy read that is sure to please. This is the beginning of a great writing career for Blackston.”

  —www.iExalt.com

  “The title says it all: You really will be flabbergasted at the fun you’ll find behind the wheel of Ray Blackston’s debut novel. Talk about your beach read! Full of quirky characters, including our slightly jaded hero, this book made me laugh out loud. Fasten your seat belts and get ready for a wild ride!”

  —Liz Curtis Higgs, best-selling author of Bad Girls of the Bible and Bookends

  “This humorous, quirky look at Christianity through the eyes of a single, nonbeliever is indeed an entertaining read.”

  —Christianbook.com

  “Intelligently funny.”

  —Singer/songwriter Andrew Peterson, Love & Thunder

  “Ray Blackston’s debut novel is a breezy story of redemption that is perfectly charming, with characters who are utterly natural and believable—even the lovely missionary who has her human quirks and foibles. The group is filled with nice but not predictable people, and reading about their summer vacation adventures is like taking a holiday yourself.”

  —The Flint Journal

  “This book is fun, entertaining, and brings you into a community that makes you want to stay and enjoy forever. It’s a great way to take a vacation to South Carolina without ever leaving the comfort of your own home.”

  —The Holland Sentinel

  “Blackston’s got casual lit style and a sweet knack for self-aware humor.”

  —The Hard Music magazine

  “My fellow single girls, all we have to do is interview all the young couples we know who have made it to marriage, figure out what they were feeling when they met, and then just go out and meet guy after guy until we all get that same feeling.”

  My name is Alexis, and I am profound

  “Many people think I’m a one-color girl, a tall, independent female whose wardrobe and choice of automobile bear witness to a preoccupation with lime. Hmmm, maybe they’re right.”

  My name is Darcy, and like most blondes, I can be difficult

  “Roommates . . . you just never know what you’re gonna get.”

  My name is Steve, and I just got a new one

  “Yes, dear, the gardening club and I survived Europe.”

  My name is Beatrice, I’m eighty-one, and I never slow down

  “My recurring dream has Mr. Right walking toward me between parted bodies of ocean, like Moses in Birkenstocks. Or maybe he’s on a sailboat.”

  My name is Lydia, and I may have to change denominations

  “I have a feeling that mission work is going to be tougher than I thought.”

  My name is Jay (and yes, of course I kissed Allie)

  “I can assure Jay that it’s tougher than he thinks.”

  My name is Allie (and it’s been a bit warm in the jungle)

  “Welcome, reader, to a delirious summer.”

  My name is Neil, and I will be your narrator

  For Charles and Phoebe, my incredible parents

  It is not good to have zeal without knowledge,

  nor to be hasty and miss the way.

  Proverbs 19:2

  Prologue

  On the sea-green wall of my Ecuadorian hut hangs a small piece of plywood, scrawled with my latest earthly perspective:

  We spend vast amounts of time and energy crafting a thesis in our heads of how life should play out, then almighty God spends an incredibly brief amount of time blowing our thesis to bits.

  So much for perspective.

  A loud knock interrupts my pondering, and I realize it’s almost time to leave for the second semester of language school.

  I recognize the knock—she’s always had a certain rhythm about her. “C’mon in,” I say.

  A peanut
bounces off my head. “Morning, Jay,” she replies, offering her usual peck on the cheek. “Whatcha doin’?”

  “Hey there. Where’re the orphans?”

  “Coloring.”

  “Turn around.”

  “Why?”

  “Just turn around, I wanna . . .” She slowly turns in a circle, her face blank, her body mocking the disengaged pose of a fashion model. “Yep, that toucan shirt is really starting to fade.”

  “It’s all I had clean. So, what’s that in your hands?”

  I quickly tuck the paper in the back pocket of my jeans. “We have to turn in a piece of original writing. Just a paragraph to translate at the start of second semester.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Um, I really need to get going. The pickup truck taxi is waiting, just pulled into the village.”

  “C’mon, Jay, lemme have a peek.”

  “I really should get going, Allie.”

  She steps forward like she wants a hug, but when I try to embrace her, she reaches around and snatches the paper from my pocket. “Fooled you.”

  “You tore the paper, woman!”

  With the paper in both hands, she turns her back and quickly skims the page. “I can’t believe you . . .”

  “Can’t believe what?”

  “Jay, you stole this. You plagiarizer!”

  “I just . . . borrowed it.”

  “I should call your language school.”

  “But I was in a hurry, and now I’ll have to write it all over.”

  “I can’t believe you stole my words.”

  “I can’t believe you tore it.”

  With a hug, a kiss, and a Spanish thesaurus, Allie sends me off on a sunny August morning, which is wintertime here in the rainforest. She’s correct, you know. She wrote the blurb about God blowing a thesis to bits. In fact, all thirteen huts in the village have a small piece of plywood on the wall, scrawled with some snippet of her writing. She even has the orphans composing verse. Says she hopes to publish them all under the title Allie Kyle’s Deeply Philosophical Jungle Poetry for Kids.

  I can’t wait.

  Well, now that I’ve been exposed as a plagiarizer, you’ll understand if I retreat to my former profession in order to make my point. And here is my point: No matter what you do with a stock, there is always someone on the other side of the trade—buying when you’re selling, selling when you’re buying. Same goes for traveling: Someone is always going your opposite direction—their east to your west, their zig to your zag.

  So it was with Neil Rucker—the guy who helped me translate my plagiarism during first semester.

  Spiritually, Neil and I were brothers. Relationally, we were single . . . though I was the one with the girlfriend, which is a bit strange because strapping, brown-eyed Neil was not only better looking than me, he was also friendlier and had been maturing in the faith ever since Algebra 1.

  My buddy Neil is still all of those things—nice looking, friendly, spiritual—although as his story progresses you’ll understand the unpredictable nature of maturing in the faith.

  I met Neil in language school in Quito, Ecuador.

  Neil taught.

  I sat in the back row.

  I had to go live in that sunbaked, nine-thousand-feet-above-sea-level capital city from March until June, mainly because my mission agency made me learn Spanish.

  Neil’s big mistake began when he befriended one of his students.

  Namely me.

  Neil mentioned to me that he had an eight-week furlough coming up and that he was looking for a place where he could find some good weather, a part-time job, and quick access to a beach. And since he was single and had not been on a date in forever due to his linguistic service to the mission field, a rich environment of churchgoing young women would be a nice bonus.

  He would get his nice bonus.

  You see, I knew of a few churchgoing women, and I told brown-eyed Neil where to find them. The rest was up to him.

  If you asked Neil today, he would tell you his furlough was in 3-D: dates, delirium, and disaster. I provided the dates, the Greenville girls provided the delirium, and Allie, well, she provided the disaster.

  What I did not know at the time, given that I was four thousand miles below South Carolina, was what had gotten into those girls since I’d left Greenville.

  Something to do with biological clocks, perhaps?

  Act

  one

  Send him to the island of misfit toys.

  —An unidentified elf

  1

  While the last of my fourteen missionary students toiled and sweated over his final examination, I remained seated at my desk, feet propped up, reading a paperback that instructs single people how to live victoriously. Only Jay Jarvis remained in my classroom. The other students had already turned in their papers and left to go celebrate, confident in their newfound ability to communicate with South America.

  As always, it was hot in our stucco school-on-the-corner. Outside I could hear street vendors barking the price of oranges and bananas, hustling their fruit between bleached-white buildings, their shouts perfectly timed between the impatient blare of car horns. It was not the ideal environment in which to take an exam, but our language school was of the nonprofit variety; we were fortunate to have the ceiling fan.

  Jay kept wiping his brow, rechecking his pages. Nervous, that guy. I’d glance up every few minutes, silently cheer him on, and continue reading my book. The word purity kept sparking on the page, as if it wanted to burn itself into my conscience, refuel, and flourish. In sizzling, equatorial Quito, I’d been pondering words like purity on a daily basis.

  Here I’d lived alone for my twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth years while teaching Spanish to God’s servants in waiting, and lately the days themselves had seemed combustible, one flaring into another below the lofty peaks of the Andes. On a good day I would go to great lengths to live a life of purity, to the point of imagining all lustful thoughts burning crisply, like some dried-up Latino newspaper. On a bad day the searing imagery would duke it out (and lose) to a scorching, black-hearted nemesis, even though I knew that all around me, in some hidden ember of circumstance, calling me back, was a raging white fire. Singleness can be a wonderful furnace.

  But enough flammable allusion. I just wanted the slowpoke to finish his test. Now that my teaching assignment was nearly over and summer furlough was coaxing me toward leisure, I wanted to get out of Quito and get back to the States. Fast. Let there be a beach, I wished. Let there be girls, I prayed.

  I had not been out on a date in seven months, one week, and a day.

  Now, whether or not this was my fault was a source of daily deliberation. Perhaps being the language teacher in a school for missionaries doesn’t ring of long-term stability, or maybe I was too straightforward, or maybe the black-hearted nemesis was messing with my head.

  Regardless, all that stood between me and furlough was my worst student, still fidgeting there in the back row, still hunched over his desk in a University of Texas T-shirt, still trying his blonde-headed best to finish the exam.

  Hurry up, Jarvis.

  I drifted in and out of my book, mostly out, my thoughts waffling between furlough and females. I didn’t mind being one of the few unattached people in our school—except for when I’d catch couples holding hands while I was teaching. Those glimpses of bliss would invariably stir up the longing for companionship, reminding me that pillow talk with myself was always so lopsided.

  Daily I spoke with God about these and other matters, though not in an empty classroom or a lonely church pew or while kneeling beside my bed. No, my theaters were airy, less formal, and very well lit. In a word, rooftops.

  While my student continued to waffle over page 3, I left him to his exam and stepped outside. Our school had an old, pull-down fire escape, and its creak was always the same when I reached up and yanked—a high squeak groaning into a deep moan. Hand over hand at lunch hour, I climbed up rusty iron stair
s, past both floors and to the flat roof of our language building. To the east a range of green mountains impaled the clouds, shadowing Quito without remorse. Within seconds—it was as if I had an appointment—a band of yellow rays broke through the clouds, splintered in their passage but still effective in their effort to roast me.

  I’d been doing this ever since I’d seen a man addressing the almighty from atop an apartment building in Mexico City. The guy would go out onto the roof three or four times a week and just blather out to God whatever was on his mind.

  The effect wasn’t lost on me. From a rooftop my words could spew out like steam evacuating a pot—a pot, of course, being inflexible and in need of frequent washings. From a rooftop I didn’t have to keep my voice down. From a rooftop I was . . . closer.

  Here, closer smelled like river rocks and raw vegetables. Knowing that I would soon be leaving Quito, I breathed deep its aroma and savored the exhale. Soon I moved to the far corner of the building, nearest the mountains, and stood on pebbles and tar paper. After five years spanning many roofs, I had yet to fall. Now, as was my habit, I turned my back to the rays and raised my voice toward the highlands:

  “Hey, before I climb down and grade Slowpoke’s test, I just want to remind you that it was you who said it was not good for man to be alone. Did you mean a young man? A middle-aged man? Speak whenever you like. Pillow talk with myself . . . is this all there will be?”

  Propelled into thin air, my words echoed off a mountainside and settled upon steep, slanted fields all heavy with crops. From my left a pigeon swooped down and landed on the edge of the roof. With two cocks of its head it sized me up before plunging toward the street, leaving behind a single gray feather that teetered at roof’s edge until the air currents yanked it down. Birds were fleeting amigos during my rooftop soliloquies. Perhaps that feather, like a handshake from a former flame, was my consolation prize.

  “You know how Latino women in tight tops affect me when I pass them on the street. Do my offenses exhaust you? C’mon, surely they’ll exhaust you at some point.”

  I took a breath and watched two clouds waltz around a mountain. Even the atmosphere had paired off.