“You knew about the Diddley Bow Horror, son, so how’n hell you never heard of Blind Izzy?”
“Would that be the same person as Isaiah Crawford Brown Washington?”
“That’s him,” Bobby Jay said, nodding. “He never did like going by that last name, since his daddy used to whup Izzy’s ass until Izzy bled, so when he enlisted for The Great War, he used his mama’s name. Anyway, Blind Izzy used to sit on a crate out front of the Flying Crow grocery, in town. You know it?”
“No,” Grover admitted.
“Probably ain’t there no more,” Bobby Jay said. “Anyway, it was tough for us who came back from the war. There wasn’t no work! Didn’t matter if you was white or negro, them uniforms they gave us didn’t count for spit. So we got on however we could, wherever we could, and even though Izzy lost his eyes in battle, the fact he could sing and play a tune made all the difference. Owner of the Flying Crow used to pay Izzy a lunch, plus some nickels, to sit out in front of that store and regale passersby. Mostly other negroes, you understand. They was in their own part of town. But working for the shipping company, I went everywhere the man needed me to go. And one day I’m off-loading freight from the back of the truck—out behind the Flying Crow—and I hear this sorrowful call to heaven, askin’ for the Lord’s mercy. I’d never heard such beautiful tragedy before. Izzy could make that cigar-box diddley bow of his play the perfect tune, to go with the words, and when he started singin’ about how the war had changed him forever, I knew I had to go have a look.”
“But I don’t understand—how this ties into what happened in 1923?” Grover asked, impatient in spite of himself.
“You wanna hear the story I got to tell or not, boy?” Bobby Jay snapped.
“Sorry, yes, I do. But I want to be able to make the connection, for the readers. Isaiah Washington’s whereabouts are unknown to this day. Somehow, he’s tied into the events of October 19, 1923, but I don’t know how or why.”
“Keep your lip zipped, son, and you might find out.”
“Of course. Please continue.”
“Okay then, like I was saying, I’m off-loading freight, and I hear Izzy singing and playing, and I figure this has got to be a man who saw the war the way I saw the war, so even though it meant getting bad looks from the truck driver, not to mention some of the negroes out in front, I went around and stood in front of Izzy’s crate, and I just listened to him go. He had a doughboy’s metal cup sitting on the ground in front of his crate, and when I dropped in a nickel of my own—more’n a few nickels in that cup that day, mind you—he stopped playing, and his face pointed right at me, and he said he’d been waitin’ for me.”
“Waiting for you?” Grover asked. “Did you meet each other overseas at some point?”
“Nope. Negro troops was separated from us white doughboys back then. This was before General Eisenhower put us all together, after the last world war.”
“Then I don’t understand why he’d say what he said.”
Bobby Jay laughed—a hard, bitter sound.
“You and me both, son! I told him he must have confused me for someone else—him being blind and all, and me not saying a word until then—but he called me by my full name, and he told me he’d been waiting since early morning for me to show up and drop my nickel in his cup. When I asked him how he could possibly know my name, he just aimed those dark glasses of his to the sky and said, ‘The Lord provideth.’ Izzy was always fond of saying that. Anyway, he had my attention by that time, so we got to talkin’ ’bout where he’d been in France, and where I’d been, and the shootin’ we’d done and which had been done to us—bullet from a Mauser caught Izzy on one side of the head, went through both eye sockets, and out the other side—and pretty soon I forgot all about my boss waiting for me in the truck. When the storekeep came out to tell me the driver was shouting my name, I dropped another nickel in Izzy’s cup, and dashed back to work, before I gave the boss an excuse to pink-slip me.”
“But that wasn’t the last time you saw Isaiah Washington, was it?” Grover asked.
“Nope. The Flying Crow became a weekly stop for my truck, and every time we rolled in, I always took a few minutes to go out front and listen to Izzy play and sing. We’d talk a bit too. Eventually everyone who’d stared at us got used to seeing this dirty white boy in coveralls talking to a blind negro boy—both of us carrying on about the war—and it was alright. Even the boss driving the truck stopped minding, and he’d time our drop so that I could take a few minutes to sit and eat lunch with my new friend.”
Grover’s shorthand pencil strokes increased their pace, as he recorded details to paper. Bobby Jay’s tale was topical—so far—because of what was presently going on with Dr. King, who’d so recently marched on Washington D.C., and his evocative speech. The story of two First World War veterans—separated by so much, four decades earlier, yet finding common ground—might run as a feel-good piece in the All-American’s editorial section. But that would only occupy a few paragraphs, and couldn’t justify the time and expense Grover had already taken tracking down Bobby Jay. What Grover wanted were specific details dealing with the emptying of an entire graveyard—supposedly through dark powers which had only been hinted at in the dispatch which had landed on Grover’s desk one week earlier.
He still didn’t know who’d sent the dispatch. But he’d made his name fleshing out unusual and extraordinary goings-on—putting fact to fiction—and people tended to send him leads all the time. When one seemed interesting or unusual enough, he investigated further. So he’d left the city, for a trip down South. Grover’s plan was to eventually wind up in Cocoa Beach, where he could devote some time to covering the space shots going up from the Cape—the new two-man Gemini launches would begin soon. He could sell words on the space program to the All-American for top dollar, and get plenty of mileage out of interviewing the astronauts.
But first, there was Bobby Jay’s slowly unraveling story.
“When did Isaiah Washington first tell you about the cave?” Grover asked, hoping to move things along.
“That came a few months later,” Bobby Jay said, his mouth turning down in a distinct frown.
“How did it come up?” Grover asked.
“It was the oddest thing,” Bobby Jay said. “I didn’t figure Izzy for voodoo. This is South Carolina, after all. Not New Orleans. But one day my truck shows up, and Izzy’s all bothered. Not playing his diddley bow. Not even singing. Just sitting out in front of the Flying Crow, his chin on his chest, talking about how the Lord’s called him to go fight evil. When I asked him what that could possibly mean—him being blinder than blind—he pointed his face to the sky again and talked about how the Lord had been talking to him ever since he’d woken up on the hospital ship, headed back from Europe. Not being the superstitious type, I’d always shied away from getting too involved with Izzy’s spiritual side. I mean, I appreciate a God-fearing man like any decent Christian ought to, but with Izzy, he had a special intensity. Seemed convinced that everything happened for a reason. God’s secret plan, or something along those lines. Anyway, Izzy said he’d been shown a vision, about how the end of the world was near. About how the forces of Satan were mobilizing, and it was up to God’s chosen faithful to stand in Satan’s way. There was an old enemy coming forth, and Izzy had been shown where and when, and it was up to him to do something about it.”
Grover’s pencil was practically skating over the page now. This was more like it. The kind of lurid stuff he’d been hoping for. Not that he believed any of it, of course. But these were the kind of details that hooked readers. A small smile perked up the corners of his mouth, as he continued the interview.
“Not much a blind vet can do against any kind of evil,” Grover commented. “What precisely did Isaiah think God wanted him to do?”
“He didn’t know. That was the thing. He didn’t know! But he was convinced of it. And nobody he told about any of it, would listen. He was in despair. That’s when he grabbed me by the
arm and made me promise to help him. Had it been any other man, I would have said no. But by that point… Izzy and I had an understanding. We were from different sides of the tracks, but the war kind of put us together—in our minds, at least. So I promised him I’d help, though I didn’t know what’n hell that would mean over time. I asked him to describe this place he’d supposedly seen, and he gave such good detail, I knew right where he was talking about.”
“The cave?” Grover guessed.
“Yup. Little cave, up in the hills. Nothing so great as Linville, in North Carolina. But a landmark just the same. When I was a teenager, we used to call it the Dead Man’s Cave, because there’s always been talk about how some Confederate troops holed up in there, fearing General Sherman’s march on the South, and never came out again. We used to go in there and scare each other with spook stories, about how we might find the skeletons. But it was a lot of silly horse shit. At least until Izzy described the place so exactly, without ever having been there, that I began to wonder if the silly stories weren’t true.”
“So what did you do?” Grover asked.
“I made arrangements to take Izzy there, at the time and date he said we needed to be there. Damned tricky, that. Me and Izzy chatting out front of the store was one thing. Me and Izzy wandering around in the countryside, at a place where only white folk ever go? I had a revolver tucked into my coat pocket, that night—just in case. Didn’t want any friendly citizens getting any ideas, if you know what I mean?”
Grover nodded. He may have been a Yankee, but he understood the old man’s drift perfectly well.
“Was it just the two of you?” Grover asked.
“Yup. Just two damned fools, going for a little hike, in the middle of the night. It was a clear evenin’, with a full moon. Almost didn’t need the oil lamp. Izzy’s feet seemed like they knew the trail, all the way to the cave mouth. I was stumblin’ and kickin’ into roots all the way, but Izzy stepped over that damned stuff like he was walking on a cloud. He barely said a word to me, the whole way. Just kept his hands on a rope I had tied to my waist, and which was also tied to his. I half-expected to drag him, but again, it was like he knew the way, without having to be told. It was just him, me, and that diddley bow of his.”
“I’m almost ashamed to admit it, this late in the tale,” said Grover, “but I’m not even sure I know what a ‘diddley bow’ is, Mister Hill.”
“Damned New Yorker, ain’t seen nothin’ ever,” muttered the old man.
Grover let the insult pass and waited for an explanation.
“Hell, son,” Bobby Jay said, “it’s nothin’ more’n a cigar box with a broom stick jammed through it, and you take the wire from the broom’s bristles and string it up tight from end to end, like a gee-tar.”
“One string only?” Grover asked. “Seems like you couldn’t do much with that.”
“You never heard Blind Izzy,” Bobby Jay said. “Man could make sounds come out of that instrument like you ain’t never heard. A virtue… virt… Hell, son, help me here, what’s the damned word for someone so good at playin’, he’s like the best in the world?”
“Virtuoso,” Grover said.
Bobby Jay snapped his fingers, and actually smiled for the first time that night.
“That’s the word! Blind Izzy was the virtuoso of the diddley bow. He had the neck from a glass bottle, that he’d broken off and worn smooth on the sharp end, and he’d run that bottle neck up and down the wire, twisting the little nut at the top of the broom stick to get the tension right, and make any note he wanted to come out of it. Plus he’d put this little warble in there—just a bit of play on the wire, wigglin’ his hand just so. Man could play and sing forever, and make it so you were either smilin’ and slappin’ your knee to the tune, or you had tears coming down your face, because he brought the hurt out—and made it be beautiful.”
“So he was good,” Grover said.
“The best,” Bobby Jay said.
“And he took the instrument along for… sentimental value? Comfort?”
“Nope. He said the Lord commanded him to bring it to the cave. He didn’t know why. And at that point, I didn’t ask. I figured we’d just spend a cold night at the cave mouth, waiting for whatever it was Izzy thought was going to happen, and when it didn’t happen… we’d laugh it off, I’d get him back home, and that would be the end of it. That’s what friends do for each other. You know? Let each other be crazy a little bit, until sanity sets in, then have a drink over it.”
“So what happened? I know the police eventually asked you about Isaiah Washington’s whereabouts. Though it doesn’t seem like anything came of it.”
“You saying it was my fault?” the old man hissed, suddenly rising halfway out of his seat. “You saying Izzy not coming back, is because of me?”
“No, Mister Hill, I don’t want to imply anything at all. But I did some asking around town, before I came out here. I never ran across a store called the Flying Crow, but there are people who remember you—from the old days. Some people think you’re responsible for Isaiah Washington’s disappearance. I suppose that’s another reason I’m here tonight. I’m giving you a chance to tell your side, since so many other people seem to have their minds made up.”
Bobby Jay slowly sat back down, the expression on his shriveled-apple face growing even more bitter than it had been when he’d been behind the barrels of his shotgun.
“That’s the problem with people,” Bobby Jay said, diverting his eyes to one of the lamps, where he stared at the gentle oil flame.
“What’s that, Mister Hill?”
“They can have all of the facts right in front of them, but if they want to decide something different—about you, about how it all goes, or how it all went—they’ll go ahead and make up their minds. And there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”
“Then help me understand, Mister Hill. The locals say you’ve lived out here, alone, almost since the day Isaiah Washington went missing. Doing odd jobs. Picking up work as you were able, but avoiding people for the most part.”
“I know what they goddamned say,” Bobby Jay muttered.
Grover waited.
“But I ain’t goddamned crazy,” Bobby Jay finished, after a lengthy pause.
“Then what happened at that cave?” Grover asked emphatically.
There was another lengthy pause, as the old man drew in a long, deep breath, then let it out slowly.
“Like I said, son, I ain’t crazy. But what you hear next? It’s gonna sound mad. And I don’t mean angry-mad. I mean mad, like madness-mad. I said it before I let you in here: this is gonna knock around in your head long after you don’t want it to. I reckon you’ve got enough to write up something for your magazine now, so you could leave, and not take anything with you that you don’t want to take. So I’ll ask, to be sure: You really wanna know the truth?”
Grover stopped writing. The old man’s eyes had taken on an especially haunted quality, as the dim light from the oil lanterns wavered in the reflection of his pupils. There was memory there. Old, jagged memory. The kind of thing that hung around inside a person, occasionally cutting new wounds. For a moment, Grover considered ending the interview—simply to spare the old man a trip to a particularly painful moment in his life.
But… no. Grover was an investigator. He didn’t flinch from the hard things which needed to be shown to the world.
“Tell me it all,” he said, fishing a fresh pencil out of his coat pocket and poising it over a new page in his notebook.
***
“The bad shit started when the moon went down,” Bobby Jay said.
“What kind of bad… stuff?” Grover asked.
“We sat there for three hours. Doin’ nothin’. It got cold. I scraped together a little fire, but there was too much smoke and not enough heat, because the underbrush was all wet. You ever feel it when the air is so thick with water, you expect the fish will start swimming out of the rivers? That’s the kind of night we had. S
o I poked at the fire and Izzy just sat there, with his black glasses off. Only time I ever remember the man taking his black glasses off.”
Bobby Jay shuddered involuntarily.
“Was he disfigured that badly?” Grover asked.
“Man had a channel carved through his face. No eyes, no eye sockets, just a deep… gouge, straight from one side of his skull, through to the other side—where his eyes shoulda been. I kept starin’ at him, and was thankful for the fact that he couldn’t see me starin’. Or… maybe he could.”
“What does that mean?”
“I swear to God, son, it felt like Izzy could sense the whole place. He kept turnin’ his head back and forth, back and forth, like one of those radars from the last war. I kept askin’ him what it was, and Izzy wouldn’t say nothin’ to me. Just kept muttering about how God had told him to be there—at the cave. Then he’d stop, and bow his head to his folded hands, and whisper these little prayers. I couldn’t rightly say what he was askin’ the Lord for, but when the moon finally dipped out of sight, that’s when I started prayin’ too. ’Cause you ain’t never seen nothin’ like what I seen come up out of that cave.”
“What?” Grover asked, his pencil’s tip almost snapping on the pad.
“They was like… they wasn’t men, and yet, they was men. Just… changed. Like you take a fish, and a snake, and a snail, and a man, and you mix them all together the way God mixed one o’ them funny duck-billed beaver animals, but there weren’t nothin’ cuddly about any of the things that came up out of the cave. In twos and threes, they staggered up. Like they was bein’ yanked on the end of an invisible chain. They had mouths like trash fish, opening and closing and opening again, and some of them walked on more than two legs, and most of them had arms that rippled and slithered like eels. They was hard to look at, because everything about them was just plain wrong. You ever see anything that just strikes the center of you as being completely unnatural, son?”
Grover didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he had an answer for that question.
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