Seth MacFarlane - A Million Ways to Die in the West

“Well, you gotta do what makes you happy, I guess.” She shrugged.

“Happy is a tall order,” he said, staring off toward the moonlit mesas in the distance, “but at least this’ll make me not dead.”

She studied his face for a moment, and he became acutely aware of being sized up by an expert. “Could it be,” she asked with raised eyebrows, “that you are also a man with a broken heart?”

A man who’s been through a recent breakup will seize on any and every opportunity to relive his misery by telling his story to anyone who will listen, and Albert was no different. Perhaps it was because he secretly hoped that eventually, if he spread the word far and wide enough, someone would emerge with a magic bullet of sorts: that one piece of sage counsel, that one solution he hadn’t thought of, that one thing that could fix his life and get Louise back.

He grabbed ahold of the moment. “Since you brought it up, can I unload all my shit on you?”

She smiled. “Well, I do owe you one.”

From high up on the ridge, the lonely, ramshackle town of Old Stump appeared almost idyllic. It lay nestled below them, just a few soft orange lights glowing amidst the vast darkness of the cold desert night. Albert and Anna sat on a wide rocky outcropping, a spot that Albert had been coming to since he was a little boy. He called it the “swearing place.” When he was a child, his mother and father had been strict Puritans who would not tolerate any foul language inside the house. So Albert would save up his cuss words till the end of each week, write them all down on a sheet of paper, then climb to the top of the ridge and shout them across the plains as loud as he could. It was perfectly cathartic, and he always felt better after screaming a mouthful of obscenities out at the hot, depressing frontier he loathed so very much.

“I did everything in the world for her,” he said, picking absently at a handful of dead grass. “If she was happy, I was happy. That’s all I cared about. I was generally broke, but I’d save every scrap of extra income just to buy her gifts as often as I could: a bouquet of roses, a new bonnet, a bottle of perfume, anything to remind her as often as possible how important she was to me and how much I loved her. She was the one thing that made the shootings and the wild animals and the Indians and the disease and the general depressing awfulness of the West somehow bearable.”

“How did you and Louise meet?” asked Anna.

“We both had dysentery in the same hospital.”

“Oh.”

Albert allowed himself a sad smile at the tender recollection. “I was over in Sherman Creek for a few days buying sheep stuff, and that’s when the outbreak hit. Leveled me for a week straight. I checked in to the hospital, and when they assigned me to a bed, I found that I’d been placed next to the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. God, even in a sweaty, feverish diarrhetic state, Louise was an absolute vision. She’d lived in Sherman Creek her entire life, and somehow we’d never crossed paths. Well, we talked and talked for a week—there was nothing else to do—and after only a few days it seemed like we’d known each other our whole lives. And I’ll tell you, what’s really special about the whole thing is that… you know how when you’ve been in a relationship with someone for a while and you’re so comfortable that it doesn’t even matter if the other person sees you going to the bathroom? Well, this was the reverse, because our relationship started with us shitting blood in front of each other. And that bonds people. So she came back to Old Stump with me, I helped her get set up with a job as a schoolmarm, and she’s been here with me ever since.”

“She a good marm?”

“She can marm. She can definitely marm. And the whole time we were together, I thought, I’m so happy. How can I possibly be this happy? One of these days she’s gonna figure out she’s too good for me . And then… one day she did.” Albert let the dead grass fall from his hands. “I finally tricked one girl into falling in love with me, and I lost her.”

Anna regarded him as she digested the tale. The pain in his voice was unmistakable, and yet there was something missing from the equation.

“Look, obviously I don’t know all the details,” she said, “but from what you’ve told me… I think you got this whole thing upside down. I mean, it sounds like you’ve had this girl on a pedestal and treated her like a queen. You’ve clearly bent over backward for her, but what’s she given you back?”

Albert seemed baffled by the question. “I told you, she made me happy in an otherwise rotten world. I mean, if someone can do that… well, they deserve to be on a pedestal.”

“Do you really want to go to San Francisco?”

“Yes, I—no. I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I don’t. I want… I just want Louise.” His voice broke ever so slightly on the last word.

“Uh-huh.” Anna nodded, accepting the shape of his predicament at face value for the moment. “Well, if this Foy guy is that much of a douche, she’ll figure it out if she’s smart. Sometimes a girl has to get a few assholes out of her system before she realizes what a good guy looks like.” She patted him gently on the arm.

And then they heard the rattle.

Albert froze. The sound had come from his left. He slowly looked down and saw it slithering between his foot and Anna’s. It was practically touching his shoe. “Oh, fuck,” he said softly.

“That’s a diamondback, isn’t it?” she said in an equally hushed tone, but with a surprising degree of calmness.

“Yeah, it is.”

“Well, fuck.”

“If we hold still, we’ll be fine.”

The snake slid across the tip of Albert’s foot. He held his breath. Deadly poisonous snakes were naturally to be feared out here on the frontier, but there was also something about them that Albert found infuriatingly arrogant. The way they showed up out of nowhere and put everyone’s whole goddamn life on hold for minutes at a time, striking mortal terror into the hearts of people who were just minding their own business. A man would stand, immobile as a statue, in fear for his life while the snake writhed around aimlessly, taking its sweet time, and not giving a fuck about anybody but itself.

“Asshole,” Albert muttered.

“Huh?” said Anna.

“Nothing.” At last, the diamondback wound its way past their little outcropping and slithered off into the darkness. Albert and Anna exhaled with relief.

“So, you’re really leaving tomorrow, huh?” she asked, casually picking up where they’d left off.

“Yeah. Tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you at least stay through the weekend? Isn’t the fair on Saturday?”

“Oh, fuck that,” Albert snorted. “Louise is gonna be there, and she’s gonna be with Foy. No way. I’m not putting myself through that.”

“Well, then, I’ll go with you,” she offered. “I haven’t really made any other friends since I’ve been in town, and I could sure use some fun. Besides, there’s no better way to make your ex-girlfriend want you back than to have her see you with another girl.”

Albert silently acknowledged the truth of that statement. He sighed. “Maybe.”

“Especially a smokin’-hot girl.” She grinned. “She sees me, she’ll be intimidated as fuck.”

“Oh, you’re very modest, I see,” said Albert, warming up a bit.

“Yes, I’m a little cocky, but with these tits I can afford to be.”

For the first time in weeks, Albert Stark laughed.

BAR BRAWLER ARRESTED FOR MURDER, the headline read. Not that the toothless old man was interested in the story. The newspaper lay draped across his upper body and face, shielding him from the vicious morning sun as he snored peacefully in front of the sheriff’s office. He didn’t notice the slender shadow that glided over him as Anna passed through the doorway.