Strange Highways

reputation was at stake, the dog reluctantly slunk across the threshold.
     Meg entered the house and locked the door behind them.
     Taking the dog's towel off a wall hook, she said, "Don't you dare shake your coat till I've dried you, pooch."
     Doofus shook his coat vigorously as Meg bent to towel his fur, spraying melted snow in her face and over nearby cabinets.
     Tommy laughed, so the dog looked at him quizzically, which made Tommy laugh harder, and Meg had to laugh too, and the dog was buoyed by all the merriment. He straightened up from his meek crouch, dared to wag his tail, and went to Tommy.
     When she and Tommy had first come home, perhaps they had been tense and frightened because of the crash they'd narrowly avoided at the blind curve on Black Oak Road, and maybe their residual fear had been communicated to Doofus, just as their laughter now lifted his spirits. Dogs were sensitive to human moods, and Meg saw no other explanation for Doofus's behavior.

    4

THE WINDOWS WERE FROSTED OVER, AND THE WIND WAS WAILING outside as if it would abrade the whole planet down to the size of a moon, then an asteroid, then a speck of dust. The house seemed all the cozier by contrast.
     Meg and Tommy ate spaghetti at the kitchen table.
     Doofus wasn't acting as strangely as he had earlier, but he was not himself. More than usual, he sought companionship, even to the extent that he didn't want to eat by himself. Meg watched with surprise and amusement as the dog pushed his dish of Alpo across the floor with his nose, to a spot beside Tommy's chair.
     "Next thing you know," Tommy said, "he's going to want to sit in a chair and have his plate on the table."
     "First," Meg said, "he'll have to learn to hold a fork properly. I hate it when he holds a fork backward."
     "We'll send him to charm school," Tommy said, twirling long strands of spaghetti onto his fork. "And maybe he can learn to stand on his hind feet and walk like a real person."
     "Once he can stand erect, he'll want to learn to dance."
     "He'll cut a fine figure on the ballroom floor."
     They grinned at each other across the dinner table, and Meg relished the special closeness that came only from being silly together. In the past two years Tommy had too seldom been in the mood for frivolity.
     Lying on the floor by his dish, Doofus ate his Alpo but didn't gobble it as usual. He nibbled daintily, frequently lifting his head and raising his floppy ears to listen to the wind moaning at the windows.
     Later, as Meg was washing the dinner dishes and as Tommy was sitting at the table reading an adventure novel, Doofus suddenly let out a low woof of alarm and sprang to his feet. He stood rigidly, staring at the cabinets on the other side of the room, those between the refrigerator and the cellar door.
     As she was about to say something to soothe the dog, Meg heard what had alarmed him: a rustling inside the cabinets.
     "Mice?" Tommy said hopefully, for he loathed rats.
     "Sounds too big for mice."
     They'd had rats before. After all, they lived on a farm that had once been attractive to rodents because of the livestock feed stored in the barn. Although the barn housed only a jeep now, and though the rats had sought better scavenging elsewhere, they returned once every winter, as if the long-ago status of Cascade Farm as a rat haven still stirred in the racial memory of each new generation.
     From within the closed cabinet came the frenzied scratching of claws on wood, then a thump as something was knocked over, then the unmistakable sound of a rat - thick, sinuous body slipping along one of the shelves, rattling the stacks of canned goods as it passed between them.
      "Really big," Tommy said, wide-eyed.
     Instead of barking, Doofus whined and padded to the other end of the kitchen, as far from the rat-inhabited cabinet as he could get. At other times he had been eager to pursue rats, although he was not especially successful at catching them.
     As she dried her hands on the dishtowel, Meg wondered again about the dog's loss of spirit. She went to the cabinet. There were three sets of doors, top to bottom, and she put her head against the middle set, listening. Nothing.
     "It's gone," she said after a long silence.
     "You're not going to open that, are you?" Tommy asked when