The Shih Tzu Shih Tshoe - The Conclusion

Greetings, WYMOP fans!

This is the conclusion of a two-part story. If you haven't yet read the beginning, I suggest you back up a day and read The Shih Tzu Shih Tshoe—the rest of this will make more sense.

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Leaving the woman to try to collect the curious canines, I ran across the street to alert the pet owners that they seemed to have lost control of the situation. I let myself into their gated yard, then found myself confronted with an interior kind of “kid corral,” fenced-in area, with a tiny swing set (complete with little slide) surrounded by a knee-high fence. I stepped over the toddler/ankle-biting dog barrier and went up the stairs to the front porch . . . where I found the house unlocked and open, the front door propped wide by a couple of logs of firewood. The huge plasma TV was still on, as was the fantastic stereo, pumping quiet music into the air of the empty house. I rang the bell.

No answer.

I knocked on the open door.

No answer.

I called out “Hello!”

You can guess, right? Yup: no answer.

I began patting myself down, looking for a pen and paper with which to leave a note. I came up with three choices of message: “I have your dogs, they’re safe, come get them;” “I have your dogs, if you ever want to see them again you’ll bring cash;” and the short, but sweet, “Thanks for the TV and stereo, dudes!” Realizing the woman across the street would see me ferrying entertainment electronics down the street to my house, I gave up on the whole note idea.

I also didn’t have a pen.

I got back to the gate out to the street just as across-the-street lady was coaxing the runaways back to the proper side of the street, shaking my box of Milk Bones and judiciously

applying the word “treat” at strategic moments. The yorkie was trotting along just as happy as all get out, but the shih tzu apparently saw through the ruse. She lay down out by the street and refused to move again, no matter how hard across-the-street lady rattled that box. Eventually the woman  simply picked up the recalcitrant canine and carried her into the yard.

The whole time, the shih tzu stared at me with an expression communicating just how undignified she found the whole “picking her up” thing, and that somehow it all my fault.

*Sigh*

So we put them in the yard, and I started to follow them in toward the house, intending to let them into the kid/pet corral . . . but when I got there I saw there was no gate. I’d just stepped over the thing when I went up to ring the bell, and hadn’t even noticed. I looked at the dogs, quick-stepping about the yard like small dogs do, and shrugged. They were home, I’d done my good deed. I was done. I started to head for home.

As I went out through the gate, across-the-street lady was talking to one of the neighbors who happened to be driving by, leaning on the car roof to lean in the driver’s window.

“Well, they’re home,” I said.

“Did you put them in the little yard?”

“Uh . . .”

“Because they usually keep them in that little yard, with the swings.”

Crap. My good deed was not done. I turned around to head back into the yard . . . and the shih tzu passed me going the other way, trotting along the top of the wall with the same “I don’t care” attitude she’d shown crossing the busy street.

“Where the hell are you going?” I said.

She just turned her head away as she kept walking, the doggy equivalent of flipping me the bird.

“Right!” I said. “The little yard it is.”

Across-the-street lady had done such a good job with her highness, mistress Shih Tzu the first time, I conscripted her again. She started herding the little dog back into the yard while

This is the most savage
yorkie pic I could find!

I went back in to look for the littler dog. I found the yorkie in the corner of the yard: apparently a leaf had made a suspicious move, and the tiny terror was busy barking the detritus into submission. Though the little beast couldn’t be heard from more than five feet away, I gave her an A for effort. Then I started dismantling the little fence.

It sounds worse than it was. All I really did was pull one of the connecting rods out of a panel join and made a gate; I mean really, who the hell fences off a part of their yard without putting in a gate? This was not my fault.

Across-the-street lady arrived with the shih tzu in tow, and we hustled the two of them into the safety of their little yard. Then across-the-street stood guard as I put the fence back together—though, as always, taking it apart had been a lot easier. I had just about gotten it back together when I looked past across-the-street lady to see the savage yorkie trotting along the top of yet another wall, apparently intending to reestablish her conflict with the leaf.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

I followed the wall back, and found its end abutted the front stairs, nicely level with one of the steps about halfway up, providing a kind of doggy highway out of the inner yard and right over to where they could pick up the wall that led straight out to the street. I looked about the yard, taking in the useless inner and outer fences, and the gates that were impediments only to people, and didn’t slow the pets at all.

“What are these people,” I said to across-the-street lady, “idiots?”

“Yes,” she replied, nodding sadly. “Yes they are.”

I scooped up the yorkie, braving her threatening squeaks and almost-barks, and plopped her in the inner yard. I ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, the dogs following along as if it were all a game. “Treats,” I lied, pointing into the house. “They’re in there!” The dogs galloped through the door, on the hunt for the elusive goodies. I waved sadly at the stereo, its lights still winking at me enticingly, booted the firewood out of the way, and slammed the door behind them.

I hot-footed it back to the street, not looking back for fear of seeing a knotted bedsheet hanging from a window with a small canine form already halfway down; at that point, I wouldn’t have put it past them. I exchanged quick pleasantries with across-the-street lady, just trying to get the hell out of there before something else went wrong. My stomach had started making noise, reminding me that I’d last seen that pot-o-pasta sitting on the stove more than an hour earlier, and I was still damn hungry. I jogged back down the hill, around to the front of my house and right in through the open garage, closing the big door behind me. I went straight into the house through the laundry room—and promptly slipped in the pile of “fertilizer” still sitting in the middle of the floor.

“Son of a bitch!”

The spaghetti was quite cold by the time I got to it.

And that's the story of The Shih Tzu Shih Tshoe. 

Talk to you later!