The guard did not answer him, because the guard was at attention.
The man said, "But you know what he is to me? To me he is a goddam — fugitive — ape."
The guards remained rigid.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Their differences from man are largely correlated with habit.
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. He gave it to the bartender, and was about to say something when Happy cut in. "Two beers for me and the rhesus here, and give him change for the jukebox."
"Twenty years I own this joint, and at last she picks up," the bartender said. "Mebbe I won't let the finance company take her, after all." He gave Pan Satyrus three dimes.
Pan drained the beer in one heartening gulp, and shuffled to the jukebox. He selected a number and fed the machine a dime. A number called "It's the Talk of the School" came bouncing out.
Pan Satyrus bowed to the lady customer, and held out his arm. She stepped into his embrace.
It wasn't much of a dance; Pan Satyrus had, perhaps, never had a keeper who watched the Arthur Murray show. But, considering that the lady had probably never danced with a simian before, it seemed to give her her money's worth, especially when Pan Satyrus did his specialty, walking on his hands while she sat on his feet.
She fed him another dollar, and then two other lady customers, neither more desirable, lined up.
Jingling a handful of change, Happy carried two beers over to Ape. "Beats working for a living."
"I dunno," Ape said. "Supposin' Pan should get a yen for one of them pigs? To an ape, they might not look bad."
"Yeah, I suppose," Happy said. "I've put up with worse after a long time at sea."
'The trip ain't long enough to make them look good," Ape said.
"You're old," Happy told him. "You're getting old, Chief."
"It's a pleasure." Ape looked up. "Yeah, mister?"
The small, pot-bellied man had followed his sunburned nose to their table. He looked down at them belligerently, but perhaps that was the way he looked at every one in a world that had given him nothing but a sunburned nose. "I seen you fellas before."
"Yeah?" Ape made the query a dismissal.
"On the TV," the little man persisted. "That's the monkey that flowed around the world this morning."
"Naw," Ape said. "That was a chimpanzee. This is a rhesus monkey. Just a little mascot of ours."
"He looks pretty big to me," the little man said. "He looks just like the one on TV."
"Television makes things look larger or smaller," Happy told him. "According to the polarity. Negative, positive, you feed it the way you want it to look."
Ape reached out and tapped the insignia on Happy's arm. "Knows what he's talking about," he said. "Radioman, First Class."
The little man scratched his scanty hair. "I think he looks just like the one on TV."
"You can't win them all," Happy said.
Ape said, "Your dame is fighting with that other lady."
They all looked over. The consort of the pot-belly and the peeling nose was squared off, reaching for the shoulders of an artificial redhead in a halter and dirndl. "You're a stinking two-bit hoor," she said.
Her opponent, undaunted, countered with: "You're a crummy rotten bitch."
Pan Satyrus shuffled over to his friends' table, and laid two dollars in front of Happy. "They're fighting over whose turn it is to dance with me," he said, and went back to being an interested spectator.
"Hey, he talked," the pot-bellied one said.
"That is just the polarity," Happy assured him. "It's very bad tonight. We'll probably get a thunder-storm."
"You better go help your dame," Ape said.
"She can take care of herself," the little man said. "Can I buy you boys a beer?"
"Sure," Happy said.
The little man went to the end of the bar not threatened by his battling mate.
"You stink like an old craphouse," one lady said.
"Your mother lays the garbageman," the other one reported. They tugged at each other's hair.
Pan Satyrus sat on a bar stool, hugging his knees and enjoying himself. The little man bought and paid for three beers. "This little twerp could make us trouble," Ape surmised.
"Trouble is what man was born to," said Happy, who had had several beers after a hard day in the country.
The blonde got hold of the redhead's halter strap and started tugging. To aid the process, she brought one foot up and planted it in the other lady's stomach. "I'll strip you bare-nekkid," she screeched. The bartender vaulted the bar and shoved them aside. "Now cut that kinda talk out," he said. "This is a family joint."