Winkie Read online

  WINKIE

  Also by Clifford Chase:

  The Hurry-Up Song: A Memoir of Losing My Brother

  Queer 13: Lesbian and Gay Writers

  Recall Seventh Grade

  WINKIE

  CLIFFORD CHASE

  Copyright © 2006 by Clifford Chase

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  “Happy Talk” copyright © 1949 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright renewed. Williamson Music owner of publication and allied rights throughout the World. International Coyright Secured.

  All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chase, Clifford.

  Winkie / Clifford Chase.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4623-7

  1. Teddy bears—Fiction. 2. Terrorists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.H3793W56 2005

  813′.6—dc22 2006041145

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For John

  WINKIE

  Part One

  “The books we read in childhood don’t exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.”

  —Bruno Schulz, from a 1936 letter to a friend

  Please state your name.

  Clifford Chase.

  And what was your relationship to the defendant?

  He was my teddy bear.

  How long have you known him?

  Since I was born, really. Because first he was my mother’s, and then she passed him on to her kids. There were five of us, and I’m the youngest, so he was very old by the time he came to me.

  What are your earliest memories of him?

  I can remember, or I can imagine, I’m not sure which, lying in my crib and holding him.

  And that would that have been when, Mr. Chase?

  I slept in a crib until I was almost five, so this could have been as late as 1963. I can remember, or almost remember, how his small body felt in my arms—small and plump. I can remember the comfort I felt in his being smaller than myself.

  Was there any indication, back then, that he was anything other than a normal toy?

  No. Though, of course, to me he always seemed alive.

  Why is that?

  The way all toys seem alive to children, I guess. But there was something else … I think it was because his eyes opened and closed. They fell shut when you laid him down, and they opened again when he sat upright.

  Why that in particular?

  It made it seem like he could see me.

  (“Objection,” says the prosecutor. “Speculation.” “Sustained,” says the judge. “The witness will please stick to facts, not feelings.”)

  Yes, sir.

  Now Mr. Chase … You said the bear belonged to your mother first.

  Yes. She got him when she was nine or ten, for Christmas. She called him Marie.

  Marie?

  He was a girl then.

  (The courtroom begins to murmur. “Order,” cries the judge. More murmuring. “Order!” Gavel blows. Silence.)

  Where and when did the bear come into your mother’s possession?

  That would have been in 1924 or ’25, in Chicago. She remembers that her parents bought him—or her—at Marshall Field’s.

  So during all that time, from 1925 until quite recently, the defendant remained, to the best of your knowledge, in the custody of someone in your family?

  Yes—Oh, except once they left him in a motel room and had to go back for him. My brother cried and cried. That was before I was born.

  (“Your honor,” says the prosecutor, “this so-called testimony …” He throws up his hands, as if helpless. “Sustained,” says the judge. “The defense will please get to the point.”)

  Of course, your honor, of course … Mr. Chase, how can you be sure the defendant is the same bear that you grew up with?

  I recognized him immediately—on the news, I mean.

  But isn’t one teddy bear the same as another?

  Oh, no, as anyone can see, Winkie is quite distinctive. I’ve never seen another bear with eyes like that, and his ears are much bigger than other bears’ ears. Besides, he’s so worn out, and he’s been mended so many times, that his face has become completely his own. I looked into that face many times as a child, and so, as I said, I recognized his photo immediately. And then I made the connection to his disappearance from my parents’ house, which was about two years ago.

  But no one reported this disappearance?

  Normally one wouldn’t report a missing teddy bear. Now, of course, I would.

  (General laughter.)

  Mr. Chase, what do you remember most about the defendant?

  I was a strange and lonely little boy, and it seemed like Winkie understood that. Because he looked strange and lonely, too.

  (The prosecutor shakes his head theatrically but makes no formal objection.)

  So your memories of him are ones of love and comfort?

  Yes.

  Can you recall anything, anything at all, to indicate that the defendant would ever commit the serious crimes of which he has been accused?

  No. He was a strange bear, but I think he was a good bear, and I still believe that. No matter what anyone says about him. Which is why I came forward.

  Thank you. No further questions.

  “He was a strange bear, but I think he was a good bear.”

  Winkie in Captivity

  1.

  Some months earlier, outside a moonlit shack in the forest, dozens of helmeted figures crept into position. Pantomimed orders; crouched runs from tree to tree; a relay of nods; stillness again. It wasn’t long before daybreak. Whitish strands of fog gathered and dispersed. Twigs dripped dew. The men blew quietly into their cold, cupped fingers, waiting.

  Inside the shack, on an old mattress as worn as himself, the little bear lay wide-awake, thinking. But it wasn’t the authorities who had roused him. In fact, he was completely unaware of them. Rather, he was sleepless with grief.

  The past, the past. How it came toward you, Winkie thought. How it moved you without even touching you. And what did it mean—to remember and to feel? What was the point in feeling it all again?

  Here in the forest he had been granted a child of his own, and she had been his joy. But before even a year had passed, she had died. In the weeks since then, alone in the cabin or wandering just as alone in the woods, Winkie had tried to understand this simple, unyielding fact.

  Late one night he fell asleep with the TV going and, a few minutes later, seemed to awaken to its flickering—though he knew he was still dreaming, and next he saw that the flickering wasn’t the TV but his little cub. She was floating there. She didn’t say so, but he understood this was the only time he’d see her. She radiated something, perhaps comfort. Gazing at each other shyly, they basked in the prese
nt moment. A flickering infinity. Then the little one said, “Think back,” and faded from view like any memory.

  That was three nights ago. Since then Winkie had gone over his life again and again, searching for the right thing to remember, even one moment that could give him hope. Of course this meant remembering all of it anyway, in snatches, all the children he’d loved and what he’d been to them; then the desolate years up on the shelf, loved by no one; and finally, by a sudden miracle he would never understand, what he’d always wished for, the gifts of life and movement—

  But what good had running away done? Even here, far from humanity, he’d lost everything.

  “Lost, lost, lost,” the stuffed bear murmured. Outside his dirty window, the horizon was just beginning to glow. Animals—the real animals—had begun to stir in their sticks and leaves. Winkie clicked shut his two glass eyes, and in that somber quiet not yet tipping into morning, his mind was drawn to earliest memories. He had never been smaller than he was now—his body was his body—but he had once been like a baby just the same. It was a time when he wasn’t even Winkie yet, when he wore a white blouse and a black velvet dress, and he belonged to the little girl Ruth. He could almost hear her calling to him, across time, “I love you, Marie”—

  A rhythmic chopping in his ears, roving flashes of light. He cradled his head in his paws, but the racket only grew worse. Recollection had been too much for him. The noise ratcheted to a merciless howl, the lights white-blue and blinding. Was he dying?

  All at once he realized the nightmare wasn’t inside him. Shielding his eyes with one paw, blinking, the bear peered up through the window to see a large metallic object, greenish and whirring, hovering above the cabin.

  Neither rising nor falling, the helicopter seemed suspended in time. But it rocked to and fro in the flashing air, as if impatient, and all around it the trees were swaying madly.

  It shone a spotlight directly on the little bear’s upturned face. Then Winkie saw other lights coming at him, from all directions in the woods.

  “You’re completely surrounded,” said the hovering craft. Its deep, metallic voice was even more piercing than the thumping of its motor. “Come out with your hands up!”

  Paws in air, Winkie stood in the doorway of the cabin, squinting in the floodlights and the helicopter wind. This must be what they do to toys that run away, he thought. He glimpsed red and blue revolving lights now, too, out in the woods, and silhouettes running between the vehicles, some carrying flashlights, some guns. They were yelling. Above the din of the aircraft he couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they seemed confused. Their guns and flashlights pointed this way and that. Even the helicopter began to buck and sway. Winkie felt sorry for it, because it had no room to land between the trees.

  “Don’t move!” the copter said, but Winkie wasn’t moving. Its voice had grown agitated. Winkie almost wanted to comfort it. “What the hell?—no, don’t—”

  A single shot rang out. Winkie felt the bullet whizz past his right ear. He flinched but didn’t dare budge. He couldn’t tell where the shot had come from. His soft arms were getting tired of being held in the air.

  “Men!” shouted the helicopter. Though the craft’s own voice was distinctly male, it seemed disgusted with the whole of the gender. “Hold—hold your fire! Hold everything!”

  All the shouting stopped, and the silhouettes came to a halt under the trees. There was only the whir of the copter. Moths flitted in the floodlight beams. Already frightened, Winkie began to tremble.

  “All right, now,” the copter yelled. “Move in!”

  The bear saw all the helmeted figures advancing toward him, guns drawn, rifles aimed. Though unexpected, the attack made sense to him as yet another misfortune, of a piece with his grief. The men stalked very, very slowly through the underbrush. It seemed they’d never get here. Even though the bear held perfectly still, bored as well as terrified, they kept yelling things like “Stay where you are!” and “Hold it!” or “Don’t you dare move, you little cocksucker!”

  Winkie felt faint. After everything he’d suffered, why should he care what they did to him now? But his two legs nearly trembled out from under him. The men drew closer. “I’ll shootcha!” one kept muttering. “I swear, I’ll shootcha! Ya think I won’t?” The man was almost sobbing now. “Asshole, I will!”

  Winkie thought, That one needs a hug. He saw a tiny burst of light. One of the subsequent thirty-nine shots knocked him over.

  A blur of creation and not-yet-consciousness. In that long instant of falling, all at once Winkie recalled his life before Ruth. Why yes, now that he thought of it, he did have memories of the factory, the box he was placed in, a fresh pine smell, the lid coming down and then darkness … Time passing … Men’s voices calling, jostling, a series of chuggings and whirrings, first with sharp bumps, then rocking, then bumps again … More jostling, more voices calling, and silence; then, all of a sudden: the lid lifted and there was the ceiling of the department store, ornate and aglow with Christmas sparkles—

  “He’s down!”

  “Fockin’ A!”

  Footfalls …

  “Come on, come on!”

  Rustling. The voices drew nearer …

  Day after day his staring eyes met those of the pink-faced children down below the glass case in which he’d been placed. These were the beams of hopeful light that etched themselves, faintly, on his blank, sawdust heart and fed his soul.

  To be an appealing object. To be invested with Christmas feeling. To be on display, which was to be a part of an important story—

  “Damn it!”

  “It wasn’t ‘dead or alive,’ dipshit—”

  One voice sounded remorseful, the other angry. Winkie’s eyes squeaked half-open to glimpse a wall of blue uniforms, their pink and brown young faces peering down at him. They were barely more than children. His eyes fell closed again.

  “That’s one weird lookin’—”

  “He dead?”

  The cold point of a rifle prodding him. Winkie drifted off again.

  … And previously, in the factory, yes, as he was stuffed and sewn—and then the tiny, tired eyes of the seamstress who stopped to admire her work for just a moment. She laid him down and his eyes closed—dark. She lifted him up and they opened—light.

  He wanted both, and the delicious difference between the two. It was his first inkling of knowledge and mystery. And of wanting.

  Chop, chop, chop, said the helicopter.

  “Call the chief.”

  “You call ’im, asshole.”

  Winkie ignored them. His mind had grown pleasantly methodical. He wanted to trace the thread of his life back even further, but soon he got lost literally in threads—in cloth, stuffing, the spool of what was to hold him together—in these his thoughts faded into smaller and smaller filaments. His soul seemed to have been gathered together along with these minute fibers. Was this abnormal? Was it magic? It seemed quite natural to him and inevitable—that there was now a will where there had been no will. For whatever reason, here had been everything necessary to create a soul.

  “Hey. Hey, wake up—”

  The point of a gun prodding him again. He willed it to stop. He wanted to keep thinking.

  “Hey, whatever you are—”

  Nervous laughter.

  What were the threads of a soul? Winkie supposed only God knew, or the soul itself that wished to create itself—

  “Is it real?”

  “… motorized … remote control maybe …”

  “Mhm.”

  This roused the wounded bear. With effort he opened his eyes fully and blinked twice, click-click, click-click, to prove he was indeed alive and real. In unison the wall of faces blinked, too. Above them the helicopter circled, searchlights roving and crossing, as if weaving Winkie’s fate.

  2.

  Wearily the chief detective peered down from the copter through his field glasses, trying for a better look. After that first shot, he couldn�
��t see anything. In a way, he didn’t want to see. The moment a criminal was apprehended always saddened him. He never understood why. He rubbed his eyes and squinted into the field glasses again. He could see only the helmets of his men and, between them, lying in the dirt—that weird midget? Yes, with the huge ears. So he hadn’t been mistaken. But the men—why were they just standing there? First they fired, against orders, and now—

  The chopper wobbled and he saw only trees. “Keep ’er steady!” he yelled.

  The chief detective had been tracking the mad bomber for seventeen years now. At last the trail had led to this cabin. They were sure. They closed in. Descriptions of the suspect had been scarce and contradictory, but a baby-size madman was hardly what he’d expected. Could be a master of disguise, he mused; maybe wore masks, walked around on stilts or something to seem taller; maybe they were trained for that, in the Near East, the Far East, Africa, wherever terrorists were bred … But when the chief had first glimpsed the little one’s face, peering up from the window of the cabin, he’d been flooded with an unusual feeling of—of what? Sympathy—overwhelming sympathy. As if he knew that little criminal’s whole story from start to finish. As if he was that fuzzy, big-eared midget, peering up into the light, caught yet wondering, terrified yet hopeful …

  “Take ‘er down,” he ordered.

  The craft tilted and the tops of trees began reassuringly speeding by. He’d been chasing this one too long, he thought. “Whacking me out,” he muttered. Normally such explanations were comforting, but now tears pressed against his eyes. Were the men using tear gas? Just then the copter alighted in a small clearing. He jumped out. He had never been so grateful to feel hard ground beneath his feet.

  He was quickly surrounded by reporters, photographers, cameramen. They demanded to be allowed nearer the cabin. “No comment,” he said importantly. He saw one of his men running toward him, waving a riot helmet.

  “Chief, Chief!” The young officer nearly crashed right into him.