Flabbergasted: A Novel

by Ray Blackston

  "Did you teach them that?"

  "The kids want to know what American children call it," said Allie, "so I do my best." After all letters were arranged and glued, she led the small children away for naps but let the older ones go for a ride in the truck with Turquoise Over Mauve.

  I waited for her at the lunch table, nervous about feeling the need to have "a talk." She took her time inside with the children, then carefully closed the door. She tiptoed down the four steps, her olive shorts just visible below her untucked T-shirt, the yellow one with the toucan embroidered on the left sleeve, the one she'd worn at the beach.

  Having washed and dried my jungle shirt, I felt clean again. "Is now a good time to take a walk?" I asked.

  "Okay, but just a short one."

  In silence, we strolled past the dining area, then out of the village and past the banana trees. Minutes passed with no hint of conversation. Finally I just blurted it out.

  "Do we need to talk about the holding hands thing?"

  She hesitated a moment. "It gets lonely here, Jay. There's so little social life with other single people. It's good to feel a warm hand. Hope you didn't mind."

  "Not at all ... it was quite nice. Really."

  "Really?"

  "Even better than poetry."

  "Whose poetry?"

  "Um ... Elizabeth Whatsername."

  "That's what I thought you meant."

  We passed the soccer field, watching dark clouds loom against the mountains, with a band of lower clouds visible where the road split the jungle.

  I nudged her arm. "That wasn't quite good enough."

  "What?"

  "Your answer. There's more to it than you just having the occasional bout of loneliness."

  "You don't know that. How could you know that?"

  "So how many times have you held Juan's hand?"

  Not willing to give in, she stopped right in the middle of the dirt road and fingered her beads. "I am female, and your logic is different than mine."

  We resumed our walk. I nudged her again. "You could just say it was nice to hold my hand."

  "It was nice to hold your hand."

  The first heavy drops peppered the road. In front of us, brown dust rose with each drop, then the drops rained down faster and the road swiftly turned to mud. We ran for leafy cover. There was no shortage of leafy cover.

  "Pull the leaves down," she said, already half soaked.

  Underneath the elephant ears, we watched the drops bounce and roll, then wobble and drip off the ends. Damp scents of earth rose in reply.

  "Those drops are huge."

  "Wild, isn't it?" she said. "When the river floods, our village takes in the refugees from tribes downstream. Our huts got pretty crowded last spring. Smelly too."

  We made a tent by pulling four enormous leaves together. Dark green shadows dimmed the day. "I thought you said November started your dry season."

  "It does ... except for when it rains."

  "I think the tenor bugs just drowned."

  We were shoulder-to-shoulder now beneath our makeshift tent. She nudged my arm. "What I never told you, Jay, is that there was a time when I was much different, when I never desired to be a missionary or live overseas. My first high school poem sorta sums it all up."

  "Am I going to have to drift off to some Amazonian sandbar to read it?"

  "No, it's a short one. I brought it with me. Care to give your opinion?" She pulled a tattered 3 x 5 card from her shirt pocket.

  "You keep them all on cards?"

  "Yep."

  "Filed alphabetically, I assume."

  "No way. That's just more male logic. I file them by emotion ... sad ones in the front."

  She handed me the card. The blue ink had faded with the years, and a raindrop had smeared the first line.

  But suddenly she took the card back, just snatched what looked like iambic pentameter right from my fingertips. "No," she said, tucking it back in her shirt pocket. "I don't think you'll get it."

  "Get what?"

  "The irony."

  "How can I get the irony if you won't let me read it?"

  "I was very young when I wrote it."

  "You're still young."

  "Maybe I'll show it to you later."

  I adjusted our leafy tent and said, "Well, can you at least tell me what heading you filed that one under?"

  She paused a moment. "Reflections."

  Big sloppy drops splattered off the leaves just above our faces. She said it was like Jesus deflecting sin.

  With her hair now moist and matted, she turned to face me. Her brown eyes, sharp and probing, met mine. "Thank you for coming to see me, Jay „

  "I'm gonna hate to leave this."

  The rain continued to rata-tata-rata-tata off the elephant ears, although I no longer saw it as rain; it seemed a kind of baptism.

  I clumsily let the edge of our tent tilt. Water ran down our backs. She squealed and returned the favor.

  "Can't you stay a few extra days?" she asked.

  "You have no idea how much I'd like to ..."

  "I wanted us to paddle the river. And we could hike out to the tower, take lunch and watch the birds again."

  "I'll never forget that."

  She turned away. "Let's not say these things."

  "What things? That I'm going to miss you? Of course I am."

  She turned back, her eyes misty. Then she blinked rapidly for a moment and slowly let her head drop. "Okay. I can't believe I'm saying this. Same here."

  The rain lightened, only a soft patter now, trickling off the leaves. I lay in my hut at midnight-wide awake. Juan slept soundly in his narrow bed.

  I'd kept a journal of my visit, scribbles of scenery and birds, conversations and misinterpreted language, monkey leaps and leaf-cutter ants, unmanly beads and bamboo torches, ridiculous views from the sides of mountains and the incredible contrasts of the rainforest to the only world I'd ever known.

  My picture frame-the silver one-sat in the window. It now had an occupant. Great smile.

  By flashlight, I began to write.

  The entry was dated November 12th-13th. I detailed the activities with the kids, the afternoon on the observation tower, my struggle with the language, and what we'd said under the elephant ears. Then I realized what she meant, not only to me, but to the village.

  I formed the letters carefully.

  God means for her to be here. She is, for this corner of the globe, his chosen one. She is the consummate servant, storing up a treasure, a wealth for others, with little earthly benefit to herself. The village sees her as I do. She is the humor and the holiness, the laughter and the spontaneity.

  Below that, I wrote, Springtime, fly her to New York. First class.

  That was all that made it on the page, though I considered writing more. What I did not write was the following: for my tomorrow is a concrete jungle in a numbers-driven world, and hers remains a ministry to a lush little village. Thus time will pass and letters will be sent, and letters will arrive and letters will be sent, and one day I'll be seated at a noisy Manhattan trading desk, oblivious to markets in motion, and will wonder once again how God got me into a Presbyterian church, to a particular beach with a particular girl on a certain weekend in May, and gave me wacky new friends and a new fresh perspective, the living words and the eternal words and the words of a black man who gives rhythm to the gospel, and once again it will occur to me that all this just cannot be happenstance ... no, surely not happenstance, nothing Presbyterian is ever happenstance. But what you didn't tell me, Asbury, is how much of life derives simply from choice.

  None of those words made it on the page. I figured that if I reread them in later years, they would only make me sad.

  I placed the journal under my bed.

  Moonlight, as if on call, poured through the screen to grace the wall again.

  I held the picture frame up to the light. My plane was leaving at 4:00.

  I could not sleep.

  I
n addition to my black clothes and my common sense, the men's room at Charlotte International could now claim my career. My best guess was that the career had languished and expired, like a high-priced deodorizer, somewhere between the porcelain and the paper-towel holder.

  Still four thousand miles from amber waves of grain, I'd become accustomed to life in the jungle. I'd lost my farmer's tan, half my southern accent, and my six-figure job on Wall Street. I was pleased with the tan and the accent, could've cared less about the job.

  No, I had not eloped with anyone. But I kept the village clean, taught Pepe the curveball, recovered from a swollen calf after a soprano bug had me for an appetizer, and convinced my roommate, Juan, that our bare-walled hut needed a new color scheme. There had been much debate over this, but he finally conceded after I explained my reasoning. By mail, we special ordered one gallon of interior latex, to be air-shipped from the Home Depot in Greenville, South Carolina. The color? Sea green, of course.

  After my visit had reached eleven days, I figured it was time to drive the old pickup back through the potholes and into Coca to use a pay phone. I called Vince Galbraith to discuss matters; I called him at his trading desk in Manhattan; I called him collect.

  He had been buying an oil stock and remarked-with unmistakable Yankee disdain-that I had missed a crucial training week with the man aging director of stock analysis. I told him I was learning to be the assistant director of trash pickup in the outskirts of the Amazon Basin and, except for a few insects, I kinda liked it in Ecuador.

  Vince had offered a curse, then a second and a third, saying he'd seen the "God thing" ruin many a great stock trader.

  I'd asked him to define the "God thing."

  He'd mumbled something aboutJesus not knowing anything about the markets and then hung up on me.

  On the fourteenth day of my visit, I'd spent hours alone in my hut, mulling over America's obsession with net worth, the comparative glances, the corporate hierarchy, the purgatory of numbers that is modern-day Wall Street: numbers measuring performance, numbers stroking egos, numbers converted to percentage and compared to other numbers, numbers up, numbers down, numbers flashing, numbers stagnant, numbers bragged on, cheered on, pouted over and prognosticated.

  Sickened of numbers, I'd poured myself a glass of jungle juice and read ten pages of a Jane Austen novel that Allie had loaned me.

  Then I read a psalm.

  Number forty. That one seemed more musical than numeric.

  Then I'd spent another hour contemplating my becoming yet another corporate lemming, clinging to a yuppie existence instead of service and adventure, clinging to subsistence rather than real experience, clinging to it all with a death grip when death was gonna come anyway. But then, death had been conquered, so what was I worried about?

  It was on that night that I wrote my official resignation letter to Vince, resigning from a job at which I never arrived.

  I was about to become employed in the hot, humid outskirts of a South American jungle.

  I would pay myself twenty-five dollars a month.

  Life without cable, VCRs, and paved roads required adjustment, but the pace invigorated the soul. I had always pictured myself living on the face of a huge clock, running just ahead of the second hand that would slam me in the butt every time I tried to slow down. But in Ecuador I felt like I was being pulled along by the minute hand, slow and steady, with enough leisure to enjoy circumference, the arc of a day.

  Now, finally, I understood the difference between tick and tock. Tick flips from the end of the tongue like something fast and hurried, as something instant, surfacy, and shallow. Tock comes from a deeper place; it's a bass note, or at least a tenor. Tocks moves more slowly. If there were a tocking time bomb, I would not run out of the building, but rather stroll through the lobby, order a cafe mocha, check the sports page for standings in the American League East, then hold the door open as a good Southerner should.

  My house in South Carolina sold the Wednesday after Thanksgiving. 'Twas about time. After paying off the mortgage, I had $28,000. I put twothirds of it away to live off, then gave the other third as an anonymous donation to a certain mission agency that sponsored a certain young lady who could certainly throw better than any Baptist I ever met.

  The time had arrived-the time to rejuggle the pertinent priorities in the life of this twenty-something.

  Tock ... tick. Tock ... tick.

  There was a Quechua pregnancy in the village: Pink-over-Purple was married to Plaid-over-Stripes.

  Figured that out myself.

  What I still hadn't figured out, though, was how Raul found the stamina to keep beating that bass drum every day, noon to dusk.

  On a Friday afternoon, in the strange eighty-five-degree heat of December, I was down the dirt road, emptying the burlap sack into Juan's designated spot for dumpage, when across the elephant ears and through the banana trees came the mongo bongo Ecuadorian backbeat of Raul's steady thumping. In throbbing waves of jungle percussion, it simply continued to continue.

  I had met Raul during my second week and found out that he actually worked two hours per day. Every morning he wove a thick collage of thread into bookmarkers, varying the patterns and sending them off to Miguel in colorful lots of fifty. I purchased two for myself-one for novels, and one for, um, quiet times.

  Miguel sold the bookmarkers to American tourists for a quarter each, with a small commission for himself, of course. Raul may have had the mind of a five-year-old, but even amid the shady markets of the rainforest, he had found a way to buy low and sell high.

  My kinda guy.

  In the distance, coming toward me from the village with two dozen giggly children, she wore jungle casual: khaki shorts, an untucked burgundy top, and her ever present wooden beads.

  "Nola," I said, waving to Allie as she trekked the dirt road, ushering her troops along.

  "Hola, Mr. Ex-broker person," she said, closer now. "How's the new career going?"

  I glanced at my mop handle. "Corporate ladder is very short. Only one rung, I think."

  "A toast to short ladders. Follow us to the soccer field. I got a letter from Darcy."

  I draped the burlap sack over a tall yellow plant, leaned my broom handle against a kapok tree, and fell in line behind the kids. Two of them tried walking backward, both of them grinning and losing their balance.

  "What'd she say in the letter?"

  "Haven't read it yet," she said, helping a child out of the undergrowth. "Okay ninos, split into two groups ... and be sure and kick the ball, not each other."

  Led by Pepe and Eduardo, twenty children sprinted to the shabby soccer field. Isabel and the rest began searching for bugs, hunched over, stalking.

  I could already sense the effect of her work with the children. They were cumulative, those kids, each new day a small addition to their development, like papier mache for the soul.

  On a thick cushion of jungle grass, we sat face-to-face. Tiny beads of perspiration glistened on her cheeks. Anxious, she pulled three pages from the lime green envelope and began reading to herself.

  I gave her ten seconds. It was all I could stand. "What?"

  "Shh, just a sec."

  "You're killing me."

  Her eyes skimmed the page. "Darcy broke up with Steve!"

  "Doesn't surprise me."

  "Well, it absolutely shocks me.... I didn't even know they were dating."

  "I sorta had a clue."

  "And she's my best friend!"

  Excited, she glanced once at the kids, then quickly devoured page one.

  A bright blue insect landed on page two. She swatted it away.

  I nibbled on straw, my curiosity running wild. "So what else is happening at good of North Hills?"

  "She said Ransom and Jamie are sure it's a boy. Wonder what they'll name it?"

  "You don't wanna know."

  "And she saw Steve at lunch with some pierced girl named Alexis. Do you know her?"

  "We met."


  She gripped the stationery with both hands, her necklace swinging slow and wooden at the lower margin. "Darcy says she wants to find herself an attorney who loves God."

  I considered this for a moment, then pronounced it reasonable. "Sounds like a plan."

  Page two landed atop page one. Allie sighed. "Poor Lydia, she's still in the dumps."

  "Baseball players," I offered, "such primates."

  "Yeah, such primates ... oh no, not Maurice!" Her eyes darted again.

  I sat up. "Is he sick?"

  "He's left the church."

  "Oh, I thought you were gonna say ... but why?"

  "Here, you read it."

  And I thumped a tiny grasshopper from page three.

  In addition to the bad news (or new news) concerning Steve and me, the church is sad to be losing our old friend Maurice. Our church newsletter said he stuck a "For Sale" sign in his yard, packed his wife and luggage in the car, and moved to Pawleys Island. He is now the co captain of an offshore charter fishing boat (and you know, Allie, how I loathe fishing ... ekh!) along with some old preacher guy named Asbury. Do you know of him? The boat is named something crazy like Asbury with Raspberries and Lemons 'n Lime, and business has been slow because the customers think they are fruit importers instead of fishermen. I miss Maurice, although I kinda like the boat name (but I always thought boat names were two words). And I miss YOU, Allie Kyle! Thanks for the Carolina beads! I'm wearing 'em to a bowl game. When can you fly back home and go on another beach trip with me and Lydia? Lots of new guys showing up on Sundays. I'll even let you drive Sherbet again! All blessings to my bestest friend.

  Darcy

  P.S. Do you ever hear from Jay? Steve said he got an e-mail that said

  Jay was really enjoying New York City.

  Across the dirt road, the jungle absorbed the cackling of unseen birds. She picked up page one again, fingering beads of dark red, bone, and natural wood as she reread what was rare on the mission field-the handwritten letter.