Winkie

by Clifford Chase

  Winkie wondered why so many of the spectators were giggling. Hadn’t everyone seen the Mole King?

  “Apparently such prayers worked quite well, by the way,” Edwin continued, his chin thrust resolutely forward. “The original Findhorn garden was, by all accounts, quite extraordinary—not only did they eliminate, um, moles, but they raised fruits and vegetables of more than twice normal size, with no fertilizers, and they were able to make their flowers bloom in the middle of winter. In short, um, they did the impossible.” Edwin had begun gesturing extravagantly with his hands, as if directing a symphony of ideas. “You see, the residents of Findhorn believe that spirits inhabit everything on the earth—animal, vegetable, or mineral—and that this whole host of metaphysical beings is ready and waiting to help us. It certainly is a very appealing idea. And I must say that the sincerity with which it’s put forth is surprisingly, um, compelling.”

  Whispering, then low, derisive chuckling emitted from the prosecutor and his favorite assistant. Number Twelve then nervously replaced a stray hair in her bun, biting her lip.

  “So, under such a belief system,” said Charles, trying to maintain his composure, “could, for instance, a, a, a teddy bear also be inhabited by such a spirit?”

  The prosecutor shook his head as if trying to fend off a swarm of gnats. “Your Honor, I won’t even dignify this line of questioning with an objection!”

  The two Unwins turned from pink to reddish purple. They could almost have been twin five-year-olds, standing their ground in the school yard. “Well then, well then, well then,” Charles said, “the witness may then, then, then, go ahead and answer the question!” He faced his twin. “Mr. Unwin—please—for the record—could a Blinka Rolling-Eyed Bear be inhabited by such a spirit?”

  Edwin stared defiantly at the courtroom. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t see why not. Findhorn’s founders wrote that, quote, quote, quote, ‘Machines, too, respond to human love and care,’ unquote. And they were known to say thank you to their garden tools and home appliances. Which is to say, this is a philosophy of unbounded, universal kindness. And who are we to say they’re, quote unquote, wrong?”

  The agitated question hung in the air a moment. “Thank you,” said Charles.

  The judge smiled at the prosecutor, who waved his puffy, freckled hand. “I have nothing whatsoever to ask this quote unquote witness. I only request that we have no more Unwins participating in this trial. One was enough.”

  A wave of laughter. Opening his mouth to speak, but not speaking, Edwin stepped down, while Charles, too, opened his mouth in vain. Yet something inside Winkie was vibrating as gloriously as a bell. First his body had been affirmed today, and now his soul. He wanted to ponder the day’s testimony for a long time, and he actually looked forward to getting back to his cell tonight, when he hoped he could repeat it all back to himself as Darryl quietly colored …

  But just then his lawyer barked, “The defense calls, um, um—Clifford Chase!”

  * * *

  Winkie’s eyes widened and he began tugging Unwin’s sleeve in disbelief. He shook his head vigorously, no!

  But really the bear was caught between yes and no—between the unbidden, headlong joy at the thought of seeing Cliff again, and the equally unbidden slap of this boy’s betrayal, so long ago but suddenly as fresh as the instant.

  “Now, now, now, Mr. Winkie,” said Unwin, casting a nervous glance toward the judge, “I can see that you don’t like this, but as we, as we, as we discussed, this is the only witness who has come forward who, who, who—”

  In fact, Unwin had so often imagined discussing Clifford Chase with his client that he had neglected actually to mention him or his offer to testify. If Winkie had been better prepared, his affection for this figure from the past might have at least tempered his bad memories. As it was, the various injustices he’d suffered under this boy and his whole family seemed to merge now with the wrongs he’d both suffered and seen over the past year and a half, starting with the abduction of his child … So that today as Chase came down the aisle, Winkie saw not a friendly witness but something more like one of his persecutors. Ignoring Unwin’s whispered arguments to the contrary, the bear folded his paws tightly and slumped back in his chair, so that his eyes barely came above the defense table.

  Meanwhile Chase, a thin, sandy-haired man in his forties, was being sworn in. “… the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” As he sat down, he glanced expectantly toward Winkie, but the bear stared ahead in fury at Unwin’s books and papers.

  The defense attorney asked the witness to state his relationship to the accused, and thus the questioning proceeded. As Unwin had meant to tell his client, Chase was one of only a handful of people who could attest to the bear’s previous life as a stuffed animal. The prosecution had been able, without much trouble, to exclude the testimony of Ruth Chase and other family members as irrelevant and/or prejudicial. But Unwin had urged the youngest son to be in court today anyway, just in case, and much to the lawyer’s surprise, the people did not object to his being called. (In fact, the judge and the prosecutor had conferred during the morning recess, agreeing that such a concession would make a favorable impression on the media—with minimal harm to the people’s case.)

  Under Unwin’s halting questioning—and despite the defendant’s obvious dismay—Chase was reasonably persuasive, bolstering the defense claim that Winkie was most certainly a toy, not a terrorist, and accounting for his whereabouts from Christmas 1925 up until about a year before the bear’s arrest, when he disappeared from the home of Ruth and David Chase. “We assumed then that Winkie, I mean Mr. Winkie, the defendant, had been misplaced,” Chase recalled. “My mother said, ‘Oh, he’ll turn up.’ But he never did, and now of course it’s clear that he ran off. My mother discovered a broken window at about the same time she noticed that Mr. Winkie was missing, and in retrospect it seems likely that that was how he escaped.”

  “Objection. Speculation.”

  “Sustained. The witness will stick to facts and refrain from drawing conclusions.” Crack.

  Unwin rolled his eyes and resumed:

  “Mr. Chase, to your knowledge—to your knowledge—had the defendant gone missing at any other time before then?”

  “No.”

  “And that, that, that would include the ten years beginning in 1993?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, so, so, during a period when Mr. Winkie is accused of constructing and mailing, um, three hundred forty-seven letter bombs, he was, to your knowledge, actually where?”

  “At my parents’ house, on a shelf in my old bedroom, by the window.”

  “And what was he doing there?”

  “He was sitting—motionless.”

  On this and other key points, Chase spoke softly yet firmly and, by all accounts, made a decent impression on the jury. However, as the prosecution no doubt had expected, his credibility suffered badly on cross-examination.

  Paging through documents, evidently medical records, the prosecutor asked, “Mr. Chase, are you depressed?”

  Chase nervously pushed his glasses up his nose. “Not particularly. Not at the moment.”

  “Because you take medication for this condition? In fact, more than one medication?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you suffer from a mental illness?”

  Unwin began to object but the judge barked, “The witness will answer.”

  “Yes,” said Chase. “I guess so.”

  “You guess so.” The prosecutor brought his fingers to both temples, as if trying to decide what to ask such a witness next. “OK, well then, let’s just suppose—” (Waving his arms crazily) “for the sake of argument, just for the sake of argument—that Mr. Winkie, the defendant, is indeed the same person as the Winkie you knew and loved as a child. Let’s just suppose.” (Shrugging) “How do you conclude that he’s a good bear? Did he ever talk to you?”

  “Well, but—”

  “Mr. Cha
se, please. Answer the question. Did he ever talk to you? Did he ever say, for example, ‘I am a very good bear’?”

  (Sadly) “No.”

  “Well then, perhaps there were acts of goodness or courage on his part that you witnessed? Perhaps he rescued you, or some other child, from a burning building?”

  From behind the curtain, the jury chuckled.

  “No … But he often let me hug him. And he listened to me.”

  “Ah, he listened. And how do you know that? Did he nod his head? Did he repeat back to you what you had just said? Did he perhaps speak appropriate words of comfort, or give you advice?”

  “Well, of course not.”

  “Of course not. Exactly. Of course not. In fact, you never saw him do, or say, anything at all, did you, Mr. Chase?”

  “…”

  “I’ll take that as a no.” (Theatrical sigh) “So, I must ask you again, Mr. Chase, how do you know he’s a good bear?”

  “Um. By the way he looked at me.”

  All eyes turned now to the defendant, who sat there scowling, his pupils crooked and wild above a snout mended with coarse thread to a shapeless nub, his face worn nearly furless except for the ragged, uncombed bits on his too-huge ears. Laughter rippled through the courtroom.

  “I see what you mean, Mr. Chase.”

  More laughter. “Defendant looks terrible,” whispered a helpful bailiff to the jury, not wanting them to miss the joke. Unwin objected but the prosecutor simply retracted his last statement. “Proceed,” said the judge.

  “You were about to say something, Mr. Chase? Don’t let me interrupt.”

  “I didn’t care how he looked … I loved him anyway. I was a child, and he was mine.”

  At this the bear himself shifted fully sideways in his chair, sighing forcefully, folding his arms again in silent, angry protest.

  “In fact, whether he was once your toy, as you believe, or he wasn’t, as so many other witnesses maintain, you know nothing at all about the defendant, do you?”

  Chase hung his head and didn’t answer. The prosecutor smiled to himself.

  “No further questions.”

  By most accounts, the day’s testimony did little to sway the jury toward acquittal and may even have bolstered the prosecution’s case. Yet somehow, in his busy fog of self-doubt, and certainly without realizing it, Unwin had intuited something of far deeper importance while devising his defense strategy—not what might persuade the jury but, rather, what the little bear himself needed to hear. For despite the shock and pain of Cliff’s testimony, Winkie left the courtroom that day a different creature.

  At first it scarcely seemed so to him. As the police van sped away and the shouts of the courthouse receded, the day’s events came back to Winkie in a jumble—Françoise’s smile … “I present to you: the Blinka Rolling-Eyed Bear” … “Machines, too, respond to human love and care” … “He was a strange bear, but I think he was a good bear, and I still believe that” … “In fact … you know nothing at all about the defendant, do you?” “…” But though that final exchange had seemed so upsetting at the time, so utterly unwelcome to his mangy ears, it now appeared strangely equal to all the others. It wasn’t that he forgave Cliff (that was for Cliff to do or not do) but that his time with Cliff was simply another fact of his existence. The notion was vast, yet light and ineffable as a feather. Rumbling along in the darkness, the bear lost himself in puzzling over it …

  Suddenly the doors of the van were flung open, and Winkie beheld with the freshness of a dream the familiar floodlit entrance of the jail, Deputy Walter in silhouette against the blue-green, rapidly stuttering light, motioning for him to descend. It wasn’t in any way a good moment, yet Winkie let it be absolutely clear to him. Click-click. That was when he decided, without really knowing why, yet knowing definitely: The next morning he would tell Unwin that he had changed his mind: He would testify, after all.

  2.

  “Good night, Mr. Bear,” said Darryl in his flat way, handing him a torn-out page showing a rose, whose many petals he had carefully colored red, orange, pink, and purple, with black leaves. Darryl had never given Winkie anything before, nor had the bear noticed any flowers in his coloring books, but here was one, and it was a present just for him. “Thank you,” Winkie said, sniffing the picture, pretending the crayon smell was like roses. He laid the page fondly next to his pillow, pulled the scratchy blanket to his chin, and, for the first time in more than a year, fell immediately into a deep sleep.

  He looked out to sea and spied in the distance a gray rat with its long pinkish rat tail running gingerly along the waves—a feat that the little animal achieved, Winkie saw, not by faith but by rapidly wiggling its vile rasp of a tail on the surface of the water. He wondered how this worked and how long the little rodent could keep it up. Was this some new kind of rat with new abilities, or was it just a regular rat who tried too hard? Soon the gray furry thing made it to a small outcropping in the middle of the flat sea. It was a bird then. The dream noticed no transformation, sudden or gradual: The rat was simply a bird, as if it had always been one—black with a clean, white head, a seabird.

  Meanwhile the dream had become a nature show, whose narrator sonorously announced, “Now he can fly off.” And indeed to Winkie’s relief the seabird pushed off from the rock—the hard surface it had needed all along—and silently took wing. The bear woke.

  The cell’s white walls remained unchanged, and the peace of sleep seemed utterly lost. Though the bird part might have been encouraging, Winkie felt only revulsion for the rest of the dream. He wanted nothing to do with that rat skittering across the water. Why dream such a thing—and today of all days, the day he was to testify? It was disgusting, and by dreaming it he was only burrowing further into his own disgust and despair. Miserable and alone, Winkie sniffed the antiseptic walls of the jail, and he thought of the angry faces shouting at him day after day both inside and outside the courthouse: “Shame!” Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter what Penelope Brackle or Edwin Unwin or anyone might say about him. He, Winkie, was nothing more than a disgusting rat that made use of its long rat tail in a disgusting and perplexing miracle of self-levitation. Such a creature could never be classified, nor its means of locomotion. It could never be understood by anyone, least of all itself, and so it had tried to hide its true nature by turning into a lovely seabird. But Winkie knew all along what the creature really was. He couldn’t help knowing it.

  “Ick,” he said, which made him think of Cliff. It was strange yesterday to see him not just grown up but middle-aged and yet to find that his own sentiments toward this person were exactly the same as they had been that fateful day in the hurricane forty years ago. The self-loathing, too, was exactly the same. “Ick, ick, ick.” He didn’t see how he’d ever overcome that pall on his soul—how he’d managed to blink and throw the book and climb through the window and jump to the lawn and on and on until his most recent resolve, just last night in the van, to testify on his own behalf.

  “I am my own bear,” he tried to tell himself.

  Never since he’d come to life had Winkie gone back on any decision, nor would he now; he would carry out his intention just as he had promised himself last night—but he was wrenched by doubt. It was in this state that the bear tugged on Unwin’s jacket that morning and, still finding his mouth unwilling to make even a sound, fell back on old ways and pantomimed his wish to testify. To his oath, too, Winkie could only nod, and then reluctantly he climbed onto the chair in the witness box and waited, with the utmost anxiety, for his lawyer’s first question.

  The bear’s sudden change of heart had taken Unwin by surprise, and he hadn’t prepared more than a rough mental list of the questions he would need to ask. But there were no other witnesses to call, his stammered pleas for even a brief recess were denied, and so it was now or never. Unwin took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and tried to enter the trancelike state that he seemed to require in order to interview his client with any success.
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  “Was it a gradual accumulation like snow,” he began, “which all at once breaks a branch and comes crashing down, or was it more like a lightning bolt, Mr. Winkie, that made you decide to tell your story today?”

  Glancing nervously at all the eyes fixed on him, Winkie swallowed and pointed to his left.

  “Snow that breaks a branch. Good,” said Unwin. “And was the accumulation a gradual realization of who you are and what formed you, for better or worse, or was it a slow understanding of the need to fight for your freedom?”

  Winkie almost began to think this wouldn’t be so difficult after all. He pointed to his left and then his right.

  “Both. Good.” Unwin breathed in and out slowly. “And when you make such a decision, does the moving forward feel like trudging through hot, dry sand or like crossing a busy street in brilliant sunshine?”

  Winkie shrugged.

  “Sometimes trudging, sometimes—”

  “Your Honor,” cried the prosecutor, holding his head in his hands as if in pain, “this is the strangest line of questioning I have ever heard in any courtroom anywhere.”

  Up to this point the spectators had been fascinated simply to see the little bear sitting in the witness box and had listened with unusual attention. But the objection brought a ripple of chuckles.

  “Well, well, I, I certainly,” Unwin said, “certainly don’t, don’t, don’t think quote unquote strange is grounds for, for, um—”

  “Sustained.” Crack. “Mr. Unwin will please stop leading the witness.”

  The defense attorney looked like he was about to cry but shut his eyes again and took several more deep breaths, which Winkie in his own nervousness mimicked. Sigh, sigh, sigh …

  “Your Honor, is this witness going to testify or not?” asked the prosecutor.