Peter Rabe - Benny Muscles In

“I’m making up.”

He lit a cigarette and waited. “You needn’t,” he called out.

He heard her laugh. He thought that she had a thousand different laughs and he hadn’t heard this one before.

Then she came into the room. She looked calm, she walked quietly, and she sat down on the couch with a soft movement.

She raised her face and laughed. She laughed at the way he was staring, but her face hardly moved.

“Pat, cut it out!”

She had used her lipstick, but only the upper lip was painted.

“Yes, Tapkow?”

“My God, what is it now?” He went to sit down next to her.

She moved away just a little and her hand went up to pull at her ear lobe. She looked him straight in the face, her smile fixed as before.

“Tapkow, to me you are dead.”

And so it snapped. He didn’t answer, he hardly seemed to react, but when he got up and went to the window, he walked but he was not there any more. And then he found his hardness again, as if it had never left him, the old Benny Tapkow, standing the way he had stood all the other times he had been alone.

It even came through to Pat. The dope was wearing off fast, dropping off like a shell, leaving the inside naked. It came through to her like the fright of a child in the dark.

“God, Benny!” she screamed. “Benny-” but when she grabbed his arms and he turned, she saw a face that couldn’t possibly care.

“Benny, Benny!” Her fists pounding his chest and all he did was lean back on the window sill to keep clear of her.

When her fists became stronger he still didn’t care, leaning a little, and he only said, “No.” Then the pounding became a painful push, catching him the way he was, not caring, and he said, “No.” It was the last thing Pat could hear, because she was crying after him, watching him toss down into the dark; she cried so hard the sound from below was lost.

The two men from out West found him that night on the terrace. It had been raining in Chicago, and the two men were still wearing their raincoats.

“Dead,” said one of them. He started to feel Benny’s pockets. He almost cut his fingers on the glass, but he got the needle out and what was left of the rest.

“Beat this,” he said. “A hophead.”