I'm Yours

"I thought you were only going to take one an hour," I said to Ben as he reached for the bottle for the second time in ten minutes.

"That's right, I am," he said. "Only I'm takin' this one for an hour from now." He threw it down. "And this one,"--he did it again--"is for the hour after that."

He pushed the shot glass away from him and filled up a highball glass about half way. "This here," Ben explained, "is for the next five hours or so. Thought I'd just get a little ahead. Can't tell, the time might come around and I'd forget. Where would I be then?"

"You might be on your way to getting sober for a change," I pointed out.

"That would be fatal," Ben said, looking at his glass. "That there's one thing I can't afford to do no more. Get sober."

His weathered face was slack like an empty saddle bag. There was the memory of toughness in it, and strength, but the man in back of the mask seemed to be facing away from the eyes, leaving them empty and strange. Ben was no older than me. About thirty-seven, I'd say, if I remembered rightly. When I left Ashley eight years before to go into the real estate business in Fall River, Ben had the top lumber mill in town. Now he didn't have a dime. According to what I'd been able to learn from the folks around town, he'd drunk it all up in the past year.

"Look, Joe," he said. "You were always my best friend. When I get about two more of these inside me," (he nodded toward the empty highball glass) "I think I'll be able to tell you the whole story."

"You could probably tell me better if you weren't gassed up," I suggested.

"No, I couldn't," Ben said. "She wouldn't let me."

"Who the hell is she?"

Ben filled his glass almost to the top this time. He put it down empty and stared across the table at me. The eyes seemed familiar again and the face was vital.

"You ain't gonna believe it, Joe," he said. "There ain't nobody would believe it. They wouldn't believe it about Charlie Newfield either when they clapped him in the loony bin." Then he asked, "How much do you think I weigh, Joe?"

"Somewhere around one-eighty, what with that beer gut and all."

"I weigh," Ben said quietly, "three hundred pounds, naked."

"You're drunk."

"I've been drunk," he said, "for about fourteen months. Some men drink because they fail at somthin'--like Jud Thomas when his girl threw him over. But not me. My girl didn't throw me over. God, no."

He put his horny hands over his ears and just sat there like that as if somebody was yelling at him and he didn't want to hear it. Then he reached quick for the glass. "Guess I ain't got as much of this stuff in me as I thought," he said desperately, choking on a huge swig of whiskey. Some of the tightness went out of his face then and he settled back again.

"You remember Sophie Lambert, Joe?"

I remembered her as a plump little girl of fifteen, with big black eyes. She was beautifully developed for her age, and all of us boys used to stare at her when we went by her house up on Black Hill. But Sophie Lambert was not for any of us. Her father watched her too close. Never let her out after school. Never let any of us on his place. Then one day we all missed her. She didn't appear in the front yard afternoons to laugh at our capers. Her father let out the story that she had gone on a long visit to an aunt in Chicago.

Ben said, "There was a lot of gossip about what happened to her. Some said she took up with a salesman and run off with him. Some said her father did away with her and buried her on the place. Sheriff Mosley sniffed around up there for a while, but couldn't find nothin'. Well, she came back here to Ashley about five years ago.

"Joe you never seen such a tasty-lookin' girl as she growed into. She was all eyes and her face was shaped like a heart. She wore her hair pulled flat back on her head and it gave her a kind of foreign look. She never wore any make-up except on her lips; painted 'em cherry-red. And what a body! You've seen girls with so much in front and behind that it just made you hungry? Well, Sophie Lambert was like that. She had a waist I could nearly touch my hands around and a pair of legs I could just stare at all day. I'm tellin' you, Joe, I never seen a girl I ever wanted so much in my life. And when I'd pass her on the street, she'd kind of give me the eye--like she was hankerin' after me, too.

"I got all dressed up one night and sharp as a tack goes up to Black Hill to the Lambert house. Thought maybe I'd call on old man Lambert and just accidentally visit a while with Sophie. Now this was only the third day she was back in town, so you can imagine my surprise when I find Sophie sittin' in the shadows on the porch, holdin' hands with Charlie Newfield.

"All of a sudden I felt all twisted up inside. I could have swore out loud right there on the porch. But instead, I just nodded to Charlie and went inside the house.

"I almost fell over Lambert. He was sittin' and rockin' in the half dark room, his ear propped close to the screen door so he could hear everything goin' on out on the porch. It was hot as the hinges of hell that night, but old man Lambert sat there all dressed up in a black suit and a white collar. And I remember thinkin' how young he looked sittin' there. I figured he must be close to sixty-five, but he didn't look no more than his late thirties. If he was glad to see me, he hid the fact pretty well. Didn't get up or nothin'. Just sat there like the only thing on earth was that little hand-holdin' scene on the porch.

" 'Evenin,' Mr. Lambert,' I said, real polite. He didn't say a word. Just gave me a dark look and stared at me under those thick eyebrows of his. So I sat down and talked about this 'n' that--the weather and the prices of corn and fertilizer and how hard help was to get down at the mill. He just said 'yes' or 'no' or 'maybe' or some such thing. Then all of a sudden I started to get a very funny idea about this guy.

"Now, mind you, he was big and solid lookin'. His face was rugged, his hands were big and tough. But somehow I got to thinkin' like--I don't know how to put it--like he wasn't real--like he might dissolve away into the shadows.

"I started to feel uneasy, so I got up to leave. I said 'Goodnight' real nice and everything, but, Joe, I was never so glad to get out of anyplace in my life. When I got out on the porch, Sophie and Charlie were gone. Just as I reached the road, I could see them goin' hand in hand 'round the corner of the old house, out toward the orchard. I felt pretty terrible then."

Ben killed the bottle and began to peel the plastic strip from the neck of a fresh one.

He filled our glasses and gripped ahold of his like he wanted to smash it. He had a real struggle getting it to his mouth, but when he did, he almost drained it in one gulp. I never saw a man drink so much before. He started talking again.

"Actually, I had two good warnings," he said. "One was that night when I stood there in Lambert's parlor and got that feelin' about him not bein' real. The other came the night I helped carry Charlie Newfield out of the Bugle Bar and Grill and load him into the nut wagon. But I wasn't listenin' to any warnings. I can't say I enjoyed cartin' Charlie off to the asylum, but I do remember kind of lickin' my chops when I thought how I had a clear field with Sophie. Yeah, that was a big night for me, all right, the night I sat on Charlie Newfield's chest in the bug wagon. If I'd done the thing he told me to do that night I'd have been a happy man today. Anyway, Charlie kicked off a couple of months later. His liver, they said. His whole insides, I'll tell ya!"

"What did Charlie tell you to do that night?" I asked.

"The same thing I'm goin' to tell you to do before this night's over," Ben answered. He closed his eyes and I saw the jaw muscles tighten on the sides of his face. He grabbed the bottle.

"Well, I went after Sophie Lambert like I never went after nothin' before. I'm no greenhorn about women, and right away I realized this was goin' to call for all my tricks. I went out and bought one of the finest chestnut mares I could find. Then one day I put on the suit I bought in Chicago, and one of them nylon shirts, cuff links and all. Sophie had just got back from the big city.

"It was a hot summer afternoon when I walked up to the Lambert place with that mare. Just as I got to the front of the house, Sophie herself came out. I'm tellin' you it was all I could do just to look at her without reachin' out and grabbin'. 'Sophie,' I says, 'I come up with this horse here.' 'That's nice,' Sophie says, real smart-like, 'I'm glad to see you travel around with good company.' 'What I meant was,' I told her, 'I brought this mare for you and your dad.' Well, she claps her hands and those eyes of hers they light up like big stars. I could see right away that she knew what I was after. She ran into the house and came out in a minute with her old man. He looked at the mare and he looked at Sophie, then he looked at me. 'Come up on the porch,' he said, 'and have some root beer.' Then he took the mare and led her around to the barn.

"Me and Sophie sat on the porch all that afternoon. But I didn't get nowhere with her because right inside the screen door I could hear a rockin' chair goin' back and forth, back and forth ..."

Ben's voice was growing hoarse. He didn't look a bit drunker than when I first saw him, but a slow numbness seemed to be slipping over him.

"She told me he was part deaf," Ben continued. "He could hear voices, she said, but he couldn't make out words very well. I grabbed her and kissed her some, but she wouldn't let me do much. She said that if the old man heard the voices stop for very long, he'd hop right out on the porch quick as a flash.

"She was like a ripe apple," Ben said. "Smooth and cool and sweet. Her face was tanned a little and she had freckles on her nose, but down below the neckline of her dress, her skin was like the flesh of a new-peeled apple. She made me hungry and excited. We used to sit on that porch whole long afternoons and sweat in the sun. I think I'd get most hungry for her in the deep end of the afternoon when the long shadows were creepin' all around the house. She'd let me take the tip of her ear between my teeth and bite it. I wouldn't bite it hard or anything--just enough to feel my teeth sinking into the flesh while my tongue pushed under the tip and bent it up a little. And all the while, on all those long afternoons and again in the nights, the chair would go on rockin' inside the front door.

"One night I couldn't stand it anymore. I told her I had to have her. That she had to be mine. I told her I wanted to take her to my shootin' cabin up on Eagle Mountain some night just when the sun was goin' down. I said I wanted to close all the shutters on the cabin and nail them up. Then I wanted to take her inside and put her on the bed in the dark and put one lighted candle on an arm of a chair by the bed and just stay there with her for about a week and never come out.

"And all the while I was tellin' her this, that damn rockin' chair just kept goin'. 'I'm goin' to stop (continued on page 14)I'm Yours (continued from Page8) that rockin' for good some night,' I told her. 'I'm just gonna reach the point where I can't stand it anymore.' She didn't say nothin' ... just gave me a sort of sly look out of the corner of her eye and giggled a little. I could see I was gettin' to her, so I made up my mind real sudden about what I was goin' to do.

"Ever since that first afternoon, I had been bringin' Lambert presents when I came to see Sophie. I brung up loads of food: hams and fish and fancy bread and stuff. Lambert was a lazy, no-account farmer and I think I was just about keepin' both of 'em.

"The next mornin' I went down to Elmer Cooper, the lawyer, and got some papers drawn up. I always figured everything had its price and so I was goin' to make a real bid for the girl I wanted. With Lambert's land goin' to pot and him just about dependin' on the stuff I was bringin' up there, I thought he'd be in no position to refuse the proposition I was gonna offer. Sure, I know it wasn't a very honorable thing to do, tryin' to buy my way in like that. But neither was what those two were doin' to me on that porch.

"That very same day I took the papers up to the Lambert farm and slapped 'em down on the table in front of the old man. After a lot of shoutin' I finally made that deaf son-of-a-bitch understand that if he signed the papers he would have a tenth interest in my lumber mill. This would give him a couple of thousand clear each year plus a fair sized expense account. He just stood there stony-cool and unruffled in his black suit and white collar, and he looked at me. Then he picked up the papers, shoved 'em at me without sayin' a word, and lumbered out of the room. By God, I stormed out of there mad as a hornet. Brushed right past Sophie on the front lawn. She called out askin' where I was goin' and I told her I was goin' to a cat house and wouldn't be back no more.

"And I meant it, too. Or thought I did."

"That night I got pretty sad and lonely. I went out for a walk along Main Street, lookin' at the women, but none of them meant a thing to me. Next mornin' I was a busted man. No appetite, no interest in work, no interest in nothin'. Moonin' around my house (I had a house then), I sort of gave up. Down I went to Elmer Cooper again and had more papers drawn up. This time the papers made Lambert a full partner in my business. Equal in everything. I knew that's what he wanted, and that's what I gave him.

"I went up to the Lambert place that afternoon determined to make Sophie mine. If the old man refused me this time, I was goin' to kill him.

"But that wasn't necessary. He signed the paper as soon as I laid it in front of him. Didn't even read it or nothin'. Didn't even look at it. He knew what it said without lookin'. Next second Sophie comes out of the kitchen all shiny and happy lookin'. Her lips were new painted bright red and she was beautiful. She came over and kissed me and said, 'Oh, Ben, we've been waitin' for you all day. What kept you?' Right then I should have wondered how she knew I'd be back, and how her dad knew what was on that paper without even lookin' at it. I should've wondered, but I didn't."

Ben hadn't drunk anything for quite some time. His eyes were wide and staring.

"The old man walked out of the parlor," Ben said, "and Sophie sat on the couch. And suddenly I knew that this was it. All the achin' and hankerin', all the crazy desire that had been inside of me boiled up and came to a head. I went over and gave that old rockin' chair by the door a good stiff kick, knockin' it over on its side. Then I grabbed her hard and dug my hands into her body. But she shoved me away.

" 'Don't grab like that,' she said. 'I wanna give it to you.' "

"Then she smiled and stretched out her arms to hold me. I took hold of her and squeezed her up tight so's I felt her against me from her lips all the way down to her toes almost. 'Don't you want me?' she whispered.

" 'Like nothin' ever before,' I whispered back and squeezed her tighter.

" 'You're absolutely sure?' she asked.

" 'Absolutely.'

" 'Be careful what you say,' she whispered. 'You gotta want only me. You gotta want all of me. Forever.'

" 'God damn it!' I said. 'You know I want you.'

" 'Say it.'

"I want you. I want you! Forever and ever!"

" 'I'm yours,' she shouted at the top of her lungs. 'I'm yours!' I got my mouth over hers and smashed her up against me till it felt like her mouth was actually inside of mine. I imagined I felt her teeth behind my teeth, her lips around the roots of my tongue. She locked her arms around my back and crushed herself against me till her breasts burned into my chest and I couldn't tell her ribs or thighs or belly from mine, and she kept on screamin' 'I'm yours! I'm yours!' like she was out of her head with passion.

"For a minute everything went black. Then I came out of it and realized what a crazy thing I was doin'. Joe, I was standin' there huggin' myself.

"Sophie was gone. I looked all around the room, half crazy. 'Sophie! Sophie!' I yelled. 'I'm here, dear,' her voice came back. Then she started screamin' again. 'I'm yours, I'm yours!' I rushed around that place like a madman. Out on the porch, out in the kitchen, up into the bedrooms. There wasn't a soul in that house, Joe! But still I kept hearin' her voice.

" 'Where are you?' I yelled. And she answered:

" 'I'm here, dear. Inside of you where I belong. I'm yours. All yours!' "

Ben rose to his feet, veins standing out on his face and his neck.

"That's where she is now," he croaked. "That's where she's been since that day. Inside of me. And now I want you to kill us this minute while I've got her good and drunk. Like Charlie Newfield asked me to do that night. Kill me and her before she sobers up and drives me stark ravin' mad!"

Ben tore a pistol out of his pocket and clapped it on the table. He stood looking at me and yelling "Kill us!" while the cold sweat broke out all over my body. Then he gave one last snort and collapsed to the floor.

All that booze he was drinking must have hit him at once. When I put my ear to his heart, I could hardly hear a beat. I called Doc Trotter and then went back to haul Ben over to the couch.

Now, I'm no weakling, but I swear I couldn't move that man. Tug as I might, he wouldn't budge. It was like he was screwed to the floor. Then I remembered what he told me about him weighing three hundred pounds. I had guessed he weighed about one-eighty. That left one-hundred-an'-twenty -- the weight of a young girl ... a well-stacked girl like Sophie Lambert ...

I ran out of there and drove my car like hell out of town. I planned to go back next day but I never got quite enough nerve to do it.

The other day I got a note from Jessie Armstead, Ben's ex-landlady. She said that Ben died in the State Asylum two weeks ago and that his lumber mill has been taken over by old man Lambert. She also mentioned that Sophie is back in town.

Been visiting some relatives in Chicago, she said.