THE DOG AND THE COMMUNIST CAR
               Copyright (C) 1987-1995 Ted Holden


Once upon a time, on the outskirts of a small town not far from
Flint Michigan, there lived a wicked and foolish farmer named
Barney Johnson who owned a wicked and foolish dog named Ralph. 
Barney Johnson didn't have many friends.  In fact, he viewed
most of the inhabitants of the earth with quite a lot of
distrust and suspicion.  There were numerous whole categories of
people which Barney didn't like:  beatniks,  people who played
tennis (whom Barney regarded as homosexuals), people who played
volleyball (even worse), Democrats, Poles, who Barney figured
belonged back in Poland, Blacks, who Barney figured belonged
back in Africa, all of the inhabitants of college towns, and
especially people who rode bicycles, and ESPECIALLY, people who
drove foreign cars.

Which is where Ralph came in.  Ralph was a strapping big
lop-eared, bushy-tailed dog of wondrously mixed ancestry who
was, simply put, the largest and strongest dog anyone in the
area had ever seen.  Barney had actually taught Ralph to charge
up behind a bicyclist and snap his jaws shut with a loud "SNAP"
right behind the victim, and then sit and snicker as the poor
sucker ran the bike into a tree or a fence trying to get out of
the way.  There were never any bite marks.  Barney's
brother-in-law, Sam, who was the judge at the local township,
used to enjoy laughing such cases out of court as Ralph
snickered from the back row and Barney laughed "Haaar, Har,
Haar...  clumsy fruitcake like that should stick to four wheels,
maybe eight."

Owners of the little open MG and Porsche sports cars which were
 starting to be seen in America in those days didn't fare much
better.  Ralph chased them, barked at them, ran them into
ditches, and labored day and night, tirelessly, dreaming up new
and exciting ways in which to terrorize them.  Barney never
tired of watching this brand of comedy;  he figured if those
pinko faggots didn't own communist cars, they wouldn't have to
worry about dogs.  That an automobile, basically an inanimate
collection of exotic metal alloys, rubber, glass, and electrical
components could be viewed as an active agent of the
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST CONSPIRACY, seemed perfectly natural to
both Barney and Ralph.  

Going into the summer of his 43rd year, Barney had never seen a
real communist, either of the human or the automotive sort, but
a merciless fate was about to remedy this oversight.  In June of
that year a certain Dr. Max Koloff (no kin to the wrestlers) had
been hired as  the new chairman of the Russian language
department at the state university and rented a small farmhouse
in which to live, partly for the open space and scenery and
partly because the little house had a garage large enough to
accommodate the good Dr's mechanical hobbies.  Koloff, when not
lecturing or writing anthologies of poetry, was an amateur
mechanic.  He owned a little blue Porsche Cabriolet, his pride
and joy, and he generally had at least one other car around to
fix up and sell; sort of a second income.  

At the time of our story, there were two cars in the garage
other than the blue Porsche:  an Austin Healey 3000 which a
colleague was working on and a 1956 Muskovitch which Dr. Koloff
was in the process of retro-fitting with a blue-printed
small-block Chevy engine and a number of American hot rod
components.



The Muskovitch belonged to distant cousin of Koloffs back in
the mother-land, whom Koloff had met briefly on an academic
exchange program in Moscow and whom he had assumed to be a
history professor there.  The cousin, a certain L. I. Petrov,
knew of Koloff's skills with wrenches and had talked him into
doing the Muskovitch conversion upon his return home.  Petrov
hated Russian cars and was determined that, if a Muskovitch was
the only car which the state would allow him to own, at least,
by God, he was going to own one that was fast and, while most
Russians would not have been able to afford such a toy, the
first deputy director of operations of the KGB could.  Koloff
didn't know about any of this;  his only concern with the
Muskovitch was to get it finished and shipped back before other
hot-rodders heard about it and began to laugh too hard.



As you might have guessed, Koloff's drive to work in the
morning took him right past Barney Johnson's front gate, where
lurked Ralph.  And, naturally enough, the first two mornings
were pretty harrowing for the good Doctor.  But the third
morning was different.  The hubcaps on the old Porsche Cabriolet
were fluted;  (there were small openings around the outer rims).
 Koloff tied knots on the ends of three burlap strips, took off
the driver's side rear hubcap, put the knotted ends of the
strips inside the hubcap and replaced it with the burlap strips
thus locked into the wheels and protruding through the flutes
around the edge of the hubcap.  

When Koloff drove past the Johnsons' gate that morning, the
burlap strips were turning with the driver's side rear wheel
and, of course, when Ralph took his cut-off angle and charged,
the first thing he noticed was the burlap strips;  "Aha! 
something on that communist car to actually BITE", he thought,
but the instant he bit down on one of those burlap strips, his
head was turning at 40 mph.  The effect was very much like that
of losing a judo contest about as badly as might possibly be
imagined;  WHAAAM!  Poor Ralph ran off crying
"Yiiii-yii-yi-yi-yi!!" and hid in the bushes on the left side of
the farmhouse with just the lop-ears visible amongst the leaves.
 

Koloff brought the Porsche to a quick halt, backed up about 150
yards to where Barney was repairing a fence near the road on a
side plot, and yelled: "Hey daddy!  Where's that ferocious,
bad-ass guard dog of yours... that can't possibly be him hiding
over there in those forsythia bushes, can it?", and drove off
with a howl of laughter, a cloud of dust, and a din of decibels,
the Abarth muffler on the Porsche howling its evil song to the
world.  Ralph sat in the bushes for several hours feeling sorry
for himself and whining "whhhhhhhn, whhhhhhhhhn, whhhhhhhhn.",
and from that day forward hid in the forsythia bushes at the
sound of sports car engines, which prolonged his life
considerably.  

Unfortunately, Barney Johnson was not as quick to learn a
lesson as his dog had been.  The neighboring farmers began to
laugh and make jokes about Ralph, who was starting to spend a
lot of time in Barney's forsythia bushes as more of the
townspeople bought little MGAs and Austin Healeys that year.  To
make matters worse, Molly, Barney's wife's parrot, who had never
liked Ralph much to begin with, began practicing sports car
imitations which soon were good enough to send Ralph into the
forsythia bushes.  

Ralph was learning that there's no such thing as losing SOME of
your nerve.  Finally, one saturday morning, old Sally Ainsley,
the town librarian, walked up to Barney at the general store and
said "You know, Mr. Johnson, I saw two of Maggie's sheep chase
that faggot dog of yours into the forsythia bushes the other
day.  Pity,  Ralph used to be such a brave dog..."

That was the last straw.  Barney waited until the next really
good thunderstorm came along and packed his trusty old
Springfield 30-06 rifle aboard his pick-up truck and headed off
for the West side of town.  "Goddammed communist car ruined mah
dog...", he thought, "gotta get rid of it."  Barney parked the
truck on the corner of a street which fed into the road on which
Dr. Koloff lived, about 100 yards to one side of the open garage
and the malevolent blue Porsche and trained the iron sights of
the rifle on the open garage door.  It was just dark enough that
he couldn't really see inside the garage, but that didn't
matter.  Barney was waiting for the right lightning stroke and
thunderclap to cover the report of the rifle anyway, and he
figured to use the lightning to show him his target.  Sure
enough.  About five minutes after he arrived, a really humongous
bolt of lightning lit up the whole world, sparkling, crackling,
and dancing amongst the clouds in the upper air.  Barney very
quickly trained the rifle on the blue Porsche and squeezed the
trigger as the most awesome thunderclap he had ever heard or
felt shook the air around him.  "GOT THAT SUMBITCH!!!", exalted
Barney, and sped triumphantly away.  

Had Barney succeeded beyond his dreams, he would have put two
holes through the luggage compartment of the Porsche; perhaps
$50 worth of damage in those days;  the Porsche's engine, which
he had thought himself to be aiming at, was actually in the
rear.  But the thunderclap had thrown his aim off just enough
that the Porsche was spared altogether.  The car Barney actually
did hit was the  56 Muskovitch.  The bullet went through the
carburetor and into the battery and, had there been any gasoline
in the gas tank, the garage and everything in it would have been
history.  As it was, there was just enough gasoline in the
carburetor and fuel pump to fry everything in the engine
compartment of the Muskovitch as Koloff and a friend, very
luckily, got to it with a fire extinguisher in time to save the
rest of the garage.  

Barney Johnson had no possible way of knowing that, through no
fault or skill of marksmanship on his own part, he had actually
accomplished what he set out to do;  he had killed a communist
car.