Paws before dying

ordered him, and this time, he heard me. I was born a golden, but lately I’d crossed the breed boundary and become at least half malamute. “Drop it!” I whispered. That’s supposed to be the way to get someone to listen, isn’t it? With dogs, it’s worth a try. So are speed and surprise. I stomped on the piece of foil, lunged for it, and snatched it up and out of his reach. Then I crushed it in my left hand, buried it in my closed fist, and held it flat against my waist, which is a permissible place to put your left hand when you’re heeling a dog in the obedience ring. “Rowdy, heel!” I said softly. In training, of course, what’s in your fist is liver, cheese, or IAMS dry cat food, but the ball of foil worked fine. Rowdy swung to my left side and, in spite of the wet ground, sat nicely, with his front feet even and his eyes fixed on my face. “Good boy,” I said. Thou shalt never, ever forget to praise thy Dog.
    I stepped off on my left foot, then switched to an AKC regulation fast pace that took us to the Johnsons’ front door in about ten seconds. Except for a low-wattage flood somewhere at the end of their driveway and a pale glow from a cellar window, the house looked completely dark. I rested my entire palm on all of the buttons of the plastic speaker box by the front door and then pounded on the door. Somewhere inside, a dog barked-Rowdy growled a low reply. Then the rain, which had let up a little, began pouring down, and the thunder started up again-My pounding on the door sounded like rattling-metal imitation thunder in a poorly produced radio play, but I wasn’t sure that anyone inside could tell it from the real thing. I leaned on the buttons again. The dog’s barking was closer this time, much closer. The speaker crackled. I heard nervous, high-pitched breathing. Edna.
    “Open up!” I ordered her calmly and firmly. Over the years, I’ve had a little practice in issuing orders, but I suppose that welcoming visitors was a trick she hadn’t mastered yet.
    “Let me in,” I said as if I expected her to do it.
    That didn’t work, either. As an obedience prospect, Edna Johnson rated somewhere below poor, but that’s probably one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said about her. The dog barked again, and I expected Rowdy to roar back and scrape at the door, but something else caught his attention. Hitting the end of his leash, he almost caught me off balance, but I held on and ran after him.
    “Easy,” I said, nearly falling on the slippery lawn. “Rowdy, wait.”
    “Leah!” I shouted over the thunder. “Kimi! Leah, yell! Where are you? Leah!” But the dog inside was still barking, and the renewed rain had brought with it a strong wind that rattled loose objects unidentifiable in the dark and blew through the hundreds of Norway maples that line every street in Newton. “Leah! Leah, where are you?”
    But I knew she couldn’t hear me. Or could she? Was she answering me? It was useless. I heard nothing but the dog and the storm. I tossed the slimy ball of foil into the air, grabbed Rowdy’s leash with both hands, and held on.
    Then I tripped on something and hit the soggy lawn hard. The fall knocked the wind out of my chest and buried my face in the muddy unmown grass, but I kept my hold on Rowdy’s leash and brought him to a halt. The damned rope. I’d forgotten it. Kaiser was kept here sometimes, tied up where he could bark and growl only a few yards from Jack’s backyard. I stood up and wiped my hands on my drenched jeans. Rowdy started off again at a slow trot. Following him had now yielded me one bag of garbage and one bad fall.
    He pulled me to the back of the Johnsons’ house, where the r°ugh, pitted blacktop ended at the closed, windowless doors to a basement garage, but also widened into a small parking lot that held a white delivery van and a mud-colored American sedan. The pale floodlight I’d noticed before was mounted above the doors.
    More rotten cheese, I thought; another stop on this ludicrous trash-barrel odyssey. Here, though, were no garbage pails, no torn plastic bags, no scraps of foil, no bits of rotten cheese. The rain had turned to an even mist that hung in the air. Thunder rolled. Suddenly, sheet lightning caught the billions of tiny droplets in the air around Rowdy, who took a couple of quick steps to one of the garage doors and began raking the rough wood with his right forepaw and whining at me. The two-car garage had two sets of