Seth MacFarlane - A Million Ways to Die in the West

“That’d be weird,” said Edward.

“Hm?” Albert answered, distracted.

Edward shrugged. “Have you ever smiled in a photograph?”

“No, have you?” asked Albert.

“Of course not.”

“No. You’d look like an insane person. But I mean that…” Albert paused, then spoke more to himself than to Edward and Ruth. “When she smiles it’s… I mean, even at the peak of our relationship—you know, that point when you’ve been with someone awhile, and you start taking it for granted, and it doesn’t even occur to you that there might be a chance you could lose her—it would still completely paralyze me every time she smiled.” His voice broke just a shred. “God, I love her so much.”

“Oh, now I feel like I’m gonna cry,” Ruth said, pulling out a lace-trimmed handkerchief Suddenly, Albert couldn’t sit there any longer.

“Let’s get fucked up,” he said.

The saloon was unbearably hot and stuffy, despite the fact that the night was relatively cool. It seemed as if every sweaty, foul-smelling cowboy living within ten miles of the little frontier town was packed into Old Stump’s utterly inadequate recreational facility. The tired-looking old piano player poked and stabbed gamely at the keys of his decaying instrument, plunking out “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” his efforts barely audible over the cacophonous roar of drunken voices. A tawny whore bent lazily over the top of the piano, watching the clumsy dance of his fingers.

While it was virtually impossible for any saloon patron to avoid the crush of bodies crammed into the room, Albert’s table in the far corner at least provided the relative relief of walls. It was the closest thing to privacy on offer at the only establishment in town.

Albert stared into his glass of whiskey, while Edward and Ruth watched with friendly concern. “So… what’re you gonna do?” asked Edward.

“I dunno,” Albert answered, not looking up. “Maybe I’ll kill myself. I could do it out in the pasture, so the sheep could eat me. They ate a dog that died out there.”

“Ew, I thought they just ate, like, grass and stuff.” Edward grimaced.

“Yeah, not these,” said Albert. “There’s something wrong with these sheep.”

Ruth put a comforting hand on Albert’s. He smiled, but he subtly pulled his hand away. Not because he didn’t appreciate Ruth’s attempt, but rather because he knew how many local rectums her fingers had been inside. Is it rectums or recta ? he wondered. What’s the plural? Perhaps tomorrow he would ride over to the next town and see if they had a dictionary. He could look up the plural of rectum . That would be a fun day.

“Look,” Ruth said gently, “I know things seem hopeless right now, but I promise there’s a lot to live for.”

Albert drained his glass of whiskey and opened the floodgates.

“Oh, really? What, Ruth? What is there to live for on the American frontier in 1882? Let me tell you something. We live in a terrible place and time. The American West is a dirty, depressing, horrible, shitty place. Everything out here that’s not you wants to kill you. Outlaws. Angry drunks. Scorned hookers. Hungry animals. Diseases. Major injuries. Minor injuries. Indians. The weather. You know how Jim Wegman the blacksmith died? Wet socks.”

“Come on, you’re exaggerating,” said Edward.

“I really am not exaggerating at all,” Albert barreled on. “He went camping, he put his foot in the creek with his sock on, his foot slowly rotted, and he died. Jesus, you can get killed just by going to the bathroom! I take my life in my hands every time I walk to my outhouse! There’s fuckin’ rattlesnakes in the grass out there, and even if I make it, oh, hey—I can still die from cholera! You know cholera?”

“The Black Shit.” Edward nodded grimly.

“The Black Shit!” Albert repeated. “The latest offering in the frontier’s Disease of the Month Club.”

“I heard it started with a Canadian railroad conductor,” Ruth chimed in.

Albert plowed ahead. “And even if you survive all those things, you know what’ll kill you? The fucking doctor . I had a cold a couple years ago, I went in there, and he says, ‘Oh, you need an ear nail.’ A nail . In my fucking ear . That’s modern medicine. ‘Hey, doc, I have a fever of 102.’ ‘Oh, you need a donkey-kickin’.’ You know what else? Our pastor has shot two people. Our pastor .”

“Really?” said Ruth.

“Yep. Shot a guy in a duel and then went and tracked down the guy’s teenage son and shot him too, ’cause he was afraid the kid would come after him outta revenge.”

“Wait, how do you know that?” asked Edward skeptically.

“Because he did a whole fucking sermon about it !! A lesson about ‘seeing things through’! Oh, by the way, here’s something else: Look behind you. See those guys at that table over there? The guys who work in the silver mines? See what they’re eating? Ribs doused in hot sauce.”

Sure enough, three filthy-looking miners sat at a nearby table, messily gnawing away at their meals.

“That’s all they eat. Did you know that?” said Albert. “They eat hot, spicy foods for every meal of the day ’cause their palates are completely dulled and desensitized from inhaling poison gas twelve hours a day. All they can taste are hot, spicy foods. You know what that kinda diet does to your guts? Let me tell you: constipation, cramps, dyspepsia, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, liver disease, kidney disease, bowel inflammation—they die from their own farts! Oh, and speaking of death, if you wanna see even more of that, you don’t need to sit inside the saloon waiting for the inevitable shoot-out, fistfight, or full-on brawl that breaks out once a night and usually results in several deaths. No, all we need to do is step outside the front door right now!”

Strutting tipsily, Albert did his best to cut a winding pathway through the crowd, leading Ruth and Edward out through the saloon’s batwing doors. He pointed across the street at a slumped-over form that lay in an alleyway next to the general store. “That is our mayor,” he declared with pomp. “He is dead. He has been lying there dead for three days, and no one has done a thing: not moved him, not looked into his death, not even replaced him with a temporary appointee. For the last three days, our mayor, the highest-ranking official in our town, has been a dead guy.”

Albert’s eyes suddenly widened. “Oh! Oh, look! Look at that! The coyotes are dragging the body away!” Sure enough, two mangy-looking desert coyotes were tugging at the mayor’s limbs with their jaws, slowly but effectively dragging the corpse farther back into the shadows of the alley.

“That is so adorable!” Albert shouted with a big drunken grin. “They’re gonna feed his dick to their young! Bye, Mr. Mayor! Have fun becoming dog poop!” With that, Albert whirled around and stumbled through the batwing doors, making his way back to his chair with a red face and a spent soul.

“ That , my friends, is the West!” he exclaimed, as Ruth and Edward joined him at the table, dutifully keeping up. “A shitty, disgusting cesspool of awfulness and despair. Fuck all of it.”

“Why don’t you shut up,” said a sweaty cowboy at the next table, clearly tired of hearing the sheep farmer complain.

“ You shut up,” said Albert reflexively.

Twenty minutes afterward, Ruth was still dabbing at the sizable gash on Albert’s forehead, which he had gotten when the sweaty cowboy flung him through the saloon window. Edward watched with concern as she dipped the already bloodied cloth back into the horse trough to moisten it. As for Albert, he was currently slumped forward in a most undignified fashion, allowing the massive amount of whiskey he’d consumed in the past ten minutes to do its holy work of spreading throughout his bloodstream and obliterating both the physical and emotional pain of the day.