The Comic Novel MEGAPACK by Jay Franklin Richard Wormser John G. Schneider

Author:Jay Franklin, Richard Wormser, John G. Schneider [Jay Franklin, Richard Wormser, John G. Schneider]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, fantasy, science fiction, novels, humor, politics
ISBN: 9781479428311
Google: M-E1DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B075NR6LL5
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2017-09-14T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Their differences from man are largely correlated with habit.

The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1946

*

As is so often the case, the last bar on the edge of town was not the nicest bar; but time—and the FBI—pressed. Happy went in first and cased the joint and came out and reported that nobody in there looked like a security man. “None of them look like they could get any kind of job at all.”

“They got dough to buy drinks,” Ape said.

“You know, that was rather fun, that party with the girls,” Pan said. “Do you think, when we get over being penniless—?”

“You’re turning dipso on us, Pan,” Happy said. “Let’s go.” Pan handed him the ridiculously thin chain. “I’m your trainer, right? Ape, maybe you oughta stay outside, a chief, maybe it doesn’t look so good, you mixing in this.”

“We blasted outa that brig together, we stick together,” Chief Bates said.

So they went in. It was, indeed, a dive and a joint. Generations of careless people had spilled beer on the unvarnished floor; decades of nervous folk had puffed cigarette, pipe and cigar smoke at the tongue-and-grooved walls; and, in the back, a parade of customers had been careless with the plumbing.

Pan Satyrus, from his lifelong background of care and cleanliness, began coughing. Ape Bates looked pained. Happy Bronstein, not so long up from the foc’sle, rattled the chain and marched to the bar.

The bartender looked at Happy, then he looked at the chain, then he looked down along the chain to Pan. “Hey,” he said, “whataya got there?”

“A monkey,” Happy said. “A rhesus monkey. Picked him up on the Rock of Gibraltar. He’s a limey monkey.”

Pan Satyrus coughed.

Ape had gone and sat at a table.

The bartender said, “Is he house-broke?”

Ape improvised. “He dances, walks on his hands, and—and does imitations. And sure, he’s house broken. He’s part of the U.S. Navy, isn’t he?”

“I dunno,” the bartender said. From his face it was a remark he could have made about anything.

A lady customer heaved herself up from her chair, and made it to the bar on runover high heels. She was dressed in short-shorts, orange, and a halter-top, purple, as well as a good deal of skin, halfway between the other two colors. “Does he bite?”

“Nope,” Happy said. “He likes ladies.”

Pan Satyrus put up his two monstrous hands in the gesture of a capuchin begging for peanuts, and caught the lady customer’s hand between his. Very gently he kissed her knuckles.

“Hey,” the lady customer said. “He’s cute.”

“Give him a buck for the jukebox and he’ll dance for you,” Happy said. He looked the lady customer over more closely, and said, “Dance with you. Correction.”

“A buck? The jook’s a dime.”

“Monkeys gotta live,” Happy said.

The lady customer wobbled back to her table and got her handbag. She had been drinking with a small, pot-bellied man with a sunburned nose; he watched her out of rheumy blue eyes.

The bartender said, “Your monkey’s the best looking guy who’s given her a tumble in thirty years.”

The lady gave Pan the dollar.

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