COORS LIGHT

Glenn Oldsen stood at the door like he did most summer nights, trying to gaze out into the neighborhood but centering his attention on small rips and tears in the screen, wondering what had come in today that would attack him tonight.
A few weeks ago, his wife had accused him of being a social cripple. “Because of you,” she said, “we have no friends.”
She decided to take a stand when she saw two neighbors across the street playing what she said was horseshoes.
“You go over there,” she demanded, “and talk to them.”
“But what would I say?” he fought. “They’re playing a game. What am I gonna do, ask them the score? I don’t even know if people keep score in horseshoes.”
“Find out,” she howled.
So, to appease her, he got the dog, leashed him up and walked across the street with his back to his own house. Imagine a man being forced to turn his back on his own home, he thought to himself at the time. Despite his resignations, he walked directly up to them not saying a word, put his eyes on the ground, moved his head and hands around vigorously — showing some elaborate body language for the woman he used to love, who was certainly peering at him from the kitchen window — but he didn’t say a word. Even though, for all intents and purposes, it appeared as if he were socializing frantically with his arms flailing about while the dog sniffed the playing field, not a word was uttered.
Finally, when he’d said all he had to say, he raced home.
For the next couple of weeks, he did this every few days or so to keep everyone happy. It seemed to work. He got used to it.
But the dog didn’t.
“How come I can get used to things easier than the dog?” he asked his wife.
“I don’t want to talk about why you get used to things easier than the dog,” she said.
But he did.
And tonight, he decided to come out from behind the screen door. Maybe his wife was right, perhaps he just needed to talk to someone he didn’t have to talk to for a change.
He was in a good mood actually, because, like most people, Glenn works on the reward system. “OK. I make it through another day. I’ll take myself out for a big sloppy pizza, maybe a dollar movie. Is it 5 o’clock yet? Where’s my reward, where’s my reward?”
Well, it was 5:45 and he’d stopped at Blockbuster on the way home and picked up two Christopher Walken movies that had never made it to the theaters as his day’s reward. But there were still more than two hours of summer sun remaining and the verticals in the den let in too much light for his liking, especially for a Christopher Walken film.
So, he started to make his way toward the house across the street. Not the one where they play horseshoes but if you were at his front door staring at the ones playing horseshoes, it would be the house directly to the right. The one where the guy has a big truck in his driveway that says, “EXTERMINATOR” on it. Glenn had often wondered if the driver brought the truck home so he and his wife wouldn’t have two car payments or if the company made him take it home so he’d never forget who he was.
It was a question worth asking, but by the time Glenn got across the street, the neighbor was down on his knees in his driveway messing with the lawnmower, having some kind of problem. Something to do with the goddamned choke, Glenn was sure.
And he was cursing.
Suddenly, Glenn didn’t seem to care about the truck anymore. “Enough!” he said, startling the man. “That’s it! We have to make a pact right now. If either one of us goes down while pushing the mower, if we peek through the fence because we sense a mower has been rumbling in one place too long and we spot a body crumpled beneath the push handles, we’re to let that man be.”
The neighbor stood up slowly and seemed to recognize Glenn. “You mean if we drop of a heart attack or something?” he asked.
“Exactly,” Glenn said. “One of us drops. The other guy sees it. Does nothing. No yelling or screaming. No Joes from down the street taking turns pounding on our chests. No neighborhood revival. None of that. One of us drops. The other sees it. Does nothing.”
“Sounds kind of odd to me.”
“Odd, man, look at us,” Glenn said angrily. “This is it. Look at you down there on your knees. Look at you!”
The neighbor looked at himself and then went to ... “Don’t look at that fucking truck, man!”
“Hey, hey, don’t talk to me like this,” the neighbor said.
“I have to,” Glenn said, lowering his voice to a whisper. “I have to talk to you like this.”
Glenn wasn’t sure if his neighbor had found this profound — that Glenn had to talk to him — or if he just wanted to get rid of him or what, but he came right into the fold.
“OK, OK, I’m in, I’m in,” the neighbor said.
“You won’t be sorry. Just think how it will be. The last thing you’ll see is the undercarriage of those mower handles. I don’t know about you, but I want to be lying on my back,” Glenn said as he buckled his knees and laid himself flat out in the man’s driveway. “I want to look straight up at the cable running from the throttle. I want to see the shiny silver chrome glistening in the sun. I want to see the tiny rust spots from those two days I left the Toro out in the rain. I want that to be the last thing I see and then everything go blank — except for that tunnel, of course, and that bright light and Leon Russell poundin’ out some chords and all that stuff.
“Oh, one more thing. And this is the important part,” Glenn added. “You can’t change your mind. Time like that, shit like that going down, a man wants to change his mind. So, just to be sure we don’t ever get the opportunity to change our minds, we’re to never speak again.”
“Never,” the neighbor said.
“Never.”
“Deal,” he grinned, cranking Glenn’s hand and getting into his truck to head up for a 12-pack of Coors Light. He didn’t tell Glenn that, Glenn just knew.
“You finally talk to someone you don’t have to talk to and you make a death pact with him?” his wife asked him as soon as he got home.
“Oh,” Glenn said, closing the blinds, “you make it sound so horrible.”