Where I grew up, dogs didn’t know anything about getting walked, mostly because, where I grew up, dogs never made it into the house. They lived in the yard, and the closest they got to anybody’s living room was the back porch. There, if the temperature outside dropped much lower than 17 degrees, they got to sleep on a pile of soiled laundry. Once in awhile, my mother might put on a sweater, step out onto the porch, and hold the screen door open just long enough to say, “OK, Chew Baby, get out there and do your business.”

If Chew Baby—whose DNA was an edgy mix of my Aunt Birdie Mae’s Chihuahua, Big Boy, and a pinto-spotted cocker spaniel named Skippy—hesitated in order to consider his options, my mother would let the door slam shut. “Well, if you don’t wanta go, I’m not standing here watching you think about it,” she would say, pulling her sweater around her and walking back into the kitchen. “You don’t wanta go, guess you’re just gonna blow up.”

That night at the supper table, my mother would announce, “I can’t figure what gets into that Chew Baby. One of his back legs is shakin’ like crazy. Lord, that dog. Must be gettin’ a chill.”

Last week I got a call from my friend Thurston. He said, “I need to ask you a favor.”

I said, “For you, Thurston, anything is a pleasure.”

Thurston said, “It involves Maisie and Boo Koo.”

Then I lied. I said, “You know I love Maisie and Boo Koo. I love them as if they were my own two little fluffy white dogs.

“What do they need their Uncle John for?” I asked. “One of them need to be fixed?”

Thurston said, “You know both Maisie and Boo Koo have had their snip-snips.You know their daddies have absolutely no interest in grandbabies.” Thurston said what he needed was just a tiny little favor. He said he and Frederick, Maisie and Boo Koo’s other daddy, were planning a little fly-away vacation—just Palm Springs for the weekend. All I would have to do, he said, was walk Maisie and Boo Koo on Friday afternoon, sometime around 5:30. After that, he said, the house sitter could take care of things. The house sitter would be working late on Friday. He would be pulling a woman’s hair through a perforated plastic bag.

I said, “Thurston, I’m not really sure I can handle this.”

Thurston said, “It’s really no problem. I have printed instructions. I’ll leave them on the kitchen island, next to the Jenn-Air. Maisie gets the blue leash, and Boo Koo gets the red. Otherwise, you really don’t have to know anything. You just take down the doggie gate and let them run to the front door. That gets them very, very excited.”

I said, “So, when I walk them, like, what do they do?”

Thurston said, “They do what every little dog does. And if they’re very good,” he said, “you can give them a treat.”

I said, “I figure this is something I can handle.”

Thurston said, “Of course you can.” Then there was a little pause, like the pause before a sales clerk tells you the actual price of a Baccarat crystal champagne flute. “But it might be nice if you got here really close to 5:30,” he said. “We try to be punctual, especially for Maisie. She loves her walkie-walkie.”

I said, “I’ll do my best.”

“And I just might want to mention,” Thurston said, making a sound that did not sound exactly like laughing, “Boo Koo is very particular about where he poops.”

At 5:30 on Friday afternoon, when I let myself in the back door, Maisie and Boo Koo were sitting on their tartan-plaid doggie beds in the kitchen. In their eyes there was a strange, wounded look.

I said, “Hello, Maisie. Hello, Boo Koo. It’s Uncle John, and, guess what, we’re going out for a walk!” Maisie put her head on her paws and checked out her toenails. Boo Koo made a noise that sounded like a snort.

On the kitchen island, sticking out from under a potato ricer, there was a note. Across the bottom of the notepaper, baby-blue italics said, “Pooch à Porter: We pick up your puppies and bring them home pretty.” In the middle of the page, there was a note, written with a blunt pencil. It said, “Maisie had fleas. Decided to dip them both. Dip makes a lot of dogs nutso. Please add $89.47 to next check.”

I said, “Well, no nasty old flea dip is going to make us nutso, is it?” I opened the doggie gate, and Maisie and Boo Koo dragged themselves across the sisal-carpeted dining room and into the entrance foyer, their freshly trimmed claws scraping on the shiny wood floors.

I bent down and snapped Boo Koo’s leash onto his little rubberized-cotton collar. I turned around and said, “Maisie.” But Maisie was not there.

In the living room, all was strangely silent. I squatted down next to Boo Koo and said, “Boo Koo, why don’t you go find that silly Maisie?” Boo Koo glanced up at me with a look that said, “Sure. And when I come back, I’ll recite the Preamble to the Constitution.”

I found Maisie under the bed in the master bedroom. She was chewing on a fabric sample. I slipped her choke collar around her neck and said, “You know, if this was Alabama, and you were part Chihuahua, you’d be in big trouble.”

By that time it was 6:30, and, all over the neighborhood, chocolate Labs and Jack Russell terriers on retractable leashes were being walked. Some of the dog walkers were carrying red plastic pooper scoopers; some of them were carrying plastic sandwich bags. I thought, “These people are actually going to put warm dog poop in a zip-and-seal Baggie. They are going to take it home and do something horrible with it.” I told myself, “I think Thurston left something off the list.”

Maisie was already sniffing the turf in the tree-lined median. Boo Koo was hiking his leg beside an ornamental Bartlett pear. On the sidewalk, other dog walkers, daintily holding their steaming Baggies in their hands, had stopped to watch. “I don’t suppose you’re going to let those babies poop without protection,” said a woman whose English bulldog had just been congratulated for a noteworthy success in doing his business.

I looked down. Maisie had already reached the point at which U-turns were no longer possible. A man with a standard poodle said, “This sort of display is absolutely disgusting.” Boo-Koo was sniffing a plot of already-dry grass. I whispered to him, “Boo-Koo, are we sure this is where we make dump-dump? Wanta take a ride to the Texaco station? You could watch the commode flush.”

“It is not the dog’s fault,” announced the woman with the self-righteous bulldog. I turned to her and said, “I beg your pardon...” But by then Boo-Koo was standing next to his dump-dump, looking confused, as if he had never seen a pile of dog shit before in his life.

The man with the poodle said, “Are you sure you belong in this neighborhood?” I stood in the middle of the median and screamed, “These are not my goddamn dogs! I do not have dogs! All I have is a CD collection!”

Back in the kitchen, I wrote a note on Thurston and Frederick’s personalized notepaper. Using a ballpoint printed with the logo of a real estate agent, I wrote: “Maisie got dipped. I think it made her crazy. You may want to buy more vodka. I’m getting ready to have a cocktail.”

That night in bed, I felt a strange itchiness on my right ankle. I felt something crawling up my left thigh. I slapped at it and turned the light on. In the halogen light, I could see blood on my fingers. It was the blood of a flea.