Dialing the Wind (1989)
Approaching Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)
Readers unfamiliar with Dialing the Wind may prefer to read these notes only after reading the collection.
Dialing the Wind (1989) by Charles L. Grant is a late 1980s collection of four novellas. Each takes place in Grant's Yoknapatawpha: Oxrun Station, a Connecticut suburb. Each story deals with a male or female protagonist having a midlife crisis and being tipped toward the madness side of the scale. This expresses itself in daydreams that seem to come true, houses that seem to come to life, country music from nearby that seems to be the work of players long dead, and a preacher's voice offering life advice from a dead spot on the radio dial that normally carries a sound like rushing wind.
Tor originally published Dialing The Wind as though it were a novel. This was unfortunate, but typical carelessness. The four novellas in this collection are well done and worth the reader's undivided attention.
Prologue
"Not a single genuine laugh," he complained, looking out at the front yard, cocking his head when something muttered in the tree that made a hazard of the end of the drive, and which I've refused to trim or cut down for that very reason.
Grant hints his narrator may be a psychiatrist. He tells us that, when newly arrived in Oxrun Station, his first new friend took him around and
[....] cannily introducing me to those she knew wouldn't condescend when they learned of my profession, or back me into party corners to tell me their dreams.
The narrator has been going through the house and possessions of the Station's recently deceased police chief, Abe Stockton. Late at night, as the Prologue begins, he shows his friend Callum Davidson one of Abe's photo albums. In a secret pocket, they find four snapshots that have no earthly reason to exist.
[....] I shuffled them as if they were cards, dealt them onto my lap as if they were Tarot. "This one is Rimer," I told him, beginning with the one on the far left and making my way down the row, "and here's Tallman Evers, Willy Peace, Frieda Harks." I stared at each one, not quite believing it myself. It had taken me all day to decide I was right. "I thought I recognized Frieda, all that hair and that smile, and as soon as I did, the others just kind of naturally fell into place."
"Well, you're wrong," Callum said quickly, reaching out to take them up, and pulling back to grasp his drink again and glance out at the yard. "You're wrong. Relatives, probably."
"Yeah," I said doubtfully.
"Jesus," he whispered.
Four citizens of the station: Rimer Nabb, Tallman Evers, Willy Peace, and Frieda Harks. They made mountain music with guitar, fiddle, mandolin, and dulcimer. In the course of Dialing the Wind's four tales, encounters with their music will counterpoint struggles and crises of four protagonists.
"Dialing the Wind"
[....] The musicians were invisible without a light from the house, and the glow from the moon barely reached the roof. She had tried several times to see who it was over there, man or men, woman or women, but she was sure that one of them was Rimer Nabb. The others could have been ghosts for all she knew.....
Widow Caroline Edlin, in her thirties, lives with two broken radios that emit shocks and sounds like rushing wind. But her skill at dialing-in stations produces a preacher offering peace. This peace spiel registers as she reflects on young women in the area who also found the preacher, before they were found murdered in their beds. At peace.
"The Sweetest Kiss"
A fiddle calling over the voice of the wind and slower, not quite the beginning of a ballad, not quite a dance; a bow drawing memories, drawing sighs, drawing blood, as a dark guitar crept beneath it and a mandolin kept in shadow and a dulcimer added songbirds that huddled in the trees and whispered promises of sunlight, promises of night until the fiddle began insisting and the music overtook the wind and the howling and the song made him step back, scowling now, ignoring the tapping, glaring as though he could see straight through his house to the other side of Thorn Road.
It was Tallman Evers. He knew it. When first he heard the music, he had asked around the neighborhood and was told of the man and his three musician friends, who talked with their songs and didn't really bother anyone, and besides, they'd once been famous, or so a few people recalled, and it was something of an honor to have them play in Oxrun Station.
Bruce didn't care.
Bruce Kanfield is a family man, successful in client taxes he prepares, investments he shepherds, and companies whose futures he charts. Until this year.
"All he wanted was some peace before the world came at him again." And so he begins daydreaming about his high school sweetheart: Nancy Arrow.
Because suddenly, wife Cora and almost-adult daughters Betsy and Lisa are not enough.
A plain man he was, in a safely plain job he'd heard enough jokes about to last him through several lifetimes. Except this was his only one, and he had the sudden growing feeling it had somehow gone wrong. And the worst part of it was, he could only blame himself if the worst was to happen. One error. One stupid mistake that had cost Harvey Athland Senior several thousand when the touted tax shelter had been disallowed, when the recommended stock had dropped to nothing. One lousy distraction-of all things, his daughters arguing in the next room-and his attention had wandered, and Athland in his rage began to spread rumors that maybe Bruce Kanfield wasn't as sharp as his reputation.
And then Nancy Arrow shows up. They tryst, make love in the park and his office in the daytime. Everything is new again. And Nancy can be his alibi, as Harvey Athland Senior has turned up dead.
"Cora," he said, and stopped.
She was at the island, chopping lettuce for a salad.
daddy, why won't it stay?
"I heard," she said before he could speak. "Where were you last night?"
He blinked slowly.
She placed the knife beside her and faced him, her expression brooking no nonsense, no flattery, no evasion. "You've been seeing another woman, haven't you." Her hands twisted spastically in her apron. "Deny it, you goddamn bastard, and I'll cut your balls off."
sweet
"Cora, I am about to be arrested for the goddamn killing of some goddamn dogs."
kiss
"And unless I can get Nancy to cooperate, I'm going to be arrested for killing Athland, too."
mine
"Nancy?" Cora's eyes shut tightly. "Oh, you bastard! Oh, you goddamn bastard!"
you're mine
He walked up to her; she backed away.
"Cora, all I've been doing-"
"I know what you've been doing."
He braced himself on the counter. "Oh really?"
Her eyes opened; he wished they hadn't. "For weeks I've known. Mooning around here, moaning about dying and losing your shirt and being alone for the rest of your life . . . you think you've been kidding anyone? Do you really think you've fooled anyone?"
"Damn it, Cora, Nancy Arrow was a friend of mine. I told you about her often enough. Jesus, all we did-"
She slapped him.
He stumbled one step back.
"Nancy," she said tonelessly. "Nancy Arrow."
"Yes," he said, one finger at his cheek.
"Never heard of her."
I don't want to die, he thought.
"From high school, remember? We were going together when I met you."
Don't want to die.
"I said I never heard of her."
He picked up the knife and slashed the blade across her face. She was too startled to cry out, and he slashed her again, slicing open the bridge of her nose, peeling back her left cheek. When she screamed at last, he punched her, and she fell, and he reached down and drew the knife down from the hollow of her throat, between her breasts, to her stomach.
Slowly.
Very slowly.
Before straightening, and turning, and walking to the basement door where he heard Betsy calling.
"What?" he demanded.
His daughter came up the stairs, trying to look around him. "Was that Mother?" she wanted to know. "Those dogs, Dad. How could-"
"Shut up," he said; and the knife caught her belly just as he saw her eyes widen at the blood on his face. On his shirt. On his hands. On his legs. And she stumbled backward, one hand clutching at the open wound, the other scrabbling frantically for the railing, until her legs stiffened, then collapsed, and she rolled down to the floor.
He followed.
Lisa screamed.
Once. And no more.
"Detective Rowan, please."
"Speaking. Mr. Kanfield? Mr. Kanfield, is that you?"
"I didn't kill him, Rowan." He hung up, and wiped the blood off the telephone.
Time enough, he decided, to wash himself off and put on clean clothes.
Blood.
Where did it all come from?
"The Sweetest Kiss" begins by posing as a successful adult male's self-congratulatory daydream. Sadly for Bruce, when the daydream begins to "come true" he does not take it as a warning that he is slipping into a murderous insanity.
The set-piece where Bruce slaughters his wife and teenage daughters is a profound shock to the reader. Grant prepared for it, but readers with any experience of Grant are completely unprepared. It is a cliche that Grant is an advocate of "quiet horror." There is nothing quiet about this magnificent scene of Bruce Kanfield spinning out of control and perpetrating -- unbeknownst to himself -- something monstrous.
The event occurs at exactly the collection's halfway point.
"As We Promise, Side by Side"
But as she turned her head anyway, lifting her face to try to catch some relief from the desultory breeze, she was distracted by the sound of a guitar drifting out of the dark. Thank you, she thought then; thanks for coming tonight.
The first time she'd heard it, just about a month ago, just after the firm had shut down and forced her out on her own, it had frightened her without her knowing why. There had been no source; just the music. Curious music that she'd sworn had been somehow written just for her.
A song with her name as the title.
A song that was only played on the cold side of midnight.
But in time she grew used to it, came to expect it, came to like it. For a while she had even walked around the streets, following it patiently like a spoor, eventually tracking it down to Thorn Road only two weeks ago, and realizing what she ought to have known all along-that it was Willy Peace and his friends, playing for themselves on the back porch of an old Cape Cod that never showed the street its lights.
She hadn't walked around the side to see the musicians; that, she thought, would have killed it.
So she listened now in the heat, as the guitar waltzed around her so slowly she grew sleepy and sagged, feeling the bass notes touch her heart and match it beat for beat, while a fiddle lamented as if it were lost in autumn fog, and a mandolin played hide-and-seek with the melody it knew, and a dulcimer hammered her name sweetly, like the hurried whisper of a child who had the best secret in the world and only a minute left to tell it.
Her head snapped up then, and her eyes snapped open, and she rubbed them harshly with the heels of her hands.
The guitar.
She heard her name.
A one-sided smile drew back her lips, a shake of her head and a motionless shrug put the conceit in its place.
Lois, divorced, lives alone in Oxrun Station. She got the house in lieu of alimony. Her love and attention for it, all the hard work of making it perfect, is the satisfaction of her life. But one very hot day, multiple crises spawn reversals and contradictions demonstrating that love for home can become obsession.
Grant skillfully juggles Lois and her friends as they rally round her. Menacing phone calls from her ex promise he is coming to town and retaking the house.
Crises for Lois and her friends multiply as the night goes on. The tempo of absurd violence and incongruous horror recalls Luis Buñuel's “The Exterminating Angel” (1962), as well as the isolated rural meltdown of T.E.D. Klein's tale "Petey" (1979).
"The Chariot Dark and Low"
There had to be time. Otherwise, he'd have to explain why he'd been undressed and in bed in the middle of the day.
Nelson Glawford, a former investment advisor employed by Bruce Kanfield until Bruce went on his spree, biked like a spector through "As We Promise, Side by Side." Now he sleeps all day, dreams he will wed Livy, and hides from bill collectors.
"You'll get something," she assured him.
"I suppose."
Her voice was stern: "You don't 'suppose' anything, Nelson Glawford, goddamn it. You do."
"Is that an order?"
"Damn right."
And he knew then why the house is burning he felt as if he were standing on the brink of unavoidable disaster-all that he had, and wanted to have, was threatened with extinction because he couldn't find a way to set his own foundation in anything else but sand. He had thought he'd known. He had believed in his skills. But the world's markets, the world's economies, the world's everydamnthing had decided the ride was over. Their ride. His ride. And he wasn't experienced enough to know how to keep from being dumped from the saddle.
He was hanging on.
But he was falling.
Nelson takes Livy out for a date, and one more attempted marriage proposal.
He hummed; it sounded false.
He couldn't whistle; his lips were too stiff and threatened to chap.
Then he stopped a few yards shy of the corner when he heard something moving away from him down Park Street, to his left. He stopped because the sound puzzled him. It wasn't a car. It wasn't a bike. It certainly wasn't someone walking down the white line dragging something behind him. His head tilted and one eye squinted, and he tried to imagine what it could be that reminded him of something riding on an irregular wheel, grind and thump, not made of metal.
A kid's tired old wagon perhaps, but there was no squeak and scrape, and no kid in his right mind would be out playing tonight; it was too cold. Unless he was coming back from the market, carrying a bag of groceries, pretending to be a wagon train on its way to California.
He continued on to the corner, looked south toward the woods, looked north toward the center of town, and saw nothing.
And heard nothing.
And shook his head with a wry smile, stepping out now and striding, swinging right on Centre Street, marching four blocks up to Chancellor Avenue, where he saw Livy just as she reached the entrance to the Mariner Cove.
For the first time, Livy accepts. She then excuses herself and vanishes from his life. In his few remaining hours in Oxrun Station, Nelson races headlong through the night of a town empty of people, cars, and electricity. Snow falls, a cold wind blows, and he cannot enter his house with key or brick.
And then, just like a mountain gospel song, the chariot arrives.
Epilogue
The narrator and Callum put away Abe Stockton's album and notes about Caroline Edlin, Bruce Kanfield, Lois, and Nelson Glawford.
Long past midnight, they walk past Rimer Nabb's empty, boarded-up house.
We headed toward the woods.
I also knew that just outside Oxrun, a few miles to the south, there had been a derailing, in the late spring of 1956. The engine, for reasons no one had been able to discover, had jumped the tracks doing ninety and had plowed a yards-wide furrow almost a hundred yards into the forest that boxed the village in. Four cars out of fifteen had followed it. Twenty-seven people had been injured, fourteen had been killed, the engineer crippled, one leg amputated above the knee.
Rimer Nabb, Tallman Evers, and Willy Peace were among the dead. Rimer had been thrown from the car through a closed window; Tallman had been crushed by a collapsing wall; and Willy had bled to death waiting for rescue.
Frieda Harks lasted until they got her to the hospital. Two hours later, smiling, her hands playing a ghost dulcimer, her lips singing a soundless song, she died.
No one knew why.
There wasn't a scratch on her.
Before they part, each realizes the other is straining to hear music on the night wind.
[....] the sweet note of a dulcimer trailing shadows in the dark.
And the guitar, and the fiddle, and the mandolin not far behind.
* * *
Grant's storytelling in Dialing the Wind demands much of the reader. The exposition we are provided with -- the estrangements, the aporias, the lush but moody telegraphic prose -- is a different order of magnitude from most stories and novels published in 1988.
And: what do the narrator and Callman have to do with Bruce Kanfield, Lois, Nelson Glawford, and Caroline Edlin?
Or with four dead musicians named Frieda Harks, Rimer Nabb, Willy Peace, and Tallman Evers? The nexus here is the photo album and notes left behind by Abe Stockton. But do the notes pertain to the four musicians or the protagonists of the four novellas?
Grant is clearly confident enough to leave all this in suspension. No one gets easy answers, or happy endings, or even guidance, in Dialing the Wind.
This, and the modernist writing style, recall the serious fiction that used to be promoted in books like Understanding Fiction by Brooks and Warren, or their rivals.
Jay
28 March 2024
