Albert shuffled into the farmhouse and hung his hat on the wooden peg next to the door. His mother and father, Elsie and George, glanced up from their wooden chairs on the other side of the room. For as long as Albert could remember, they had sat in those chairs all evening, every evening, Elsie sewing and George reading the Bible. And with both of them in their early seventies, that didn’t seem likely to change.
“You’re late,” his father grunted.
“For what?” Albert asked.
There was a pause. “Fair enough,” his father answered, and returned to his scripture.
That would be the extent of the evening’s conversation. All in all, a lively, textured discussion compared to most nights.
Albert retreated into his dark little room and knelt down to reach under the bed. He pulled out a small, unmarked wooden box and carried it out to the front porch. The sun was sinking fast below the horizon. Albert lit a kerosene lamp and placed it next to the rickety old rocking chair that probably had only another six months left before it collapsed beneath some unlucky behind. He sat down and opened the box.
Inside were sepia-toned memories: the grand history of the great lovers Albert Stark and Louise Daniels. In actuality, there were only three pictures, but since photographs were hard to come by, Albert considered it a treasure trove. As he stared longingly at the shadows of better days frozen in time, he heard the approaching clip-clop of hoofbeats. He looked up and saw Edward and Ruth approaching in their tottery little buggy. A happy couple, he thought, with a twinge of resentment, then quickly and silently chided himself for the unwarranted burst of negativity. These were his friends, and they wanted to help. Nonetheless, his reaction was only human: To the man in a secure relationship, love was a bountiful feast to be enjoyed by all in attendance. But to the man without a companion, the feast was watched bitterly from outside through a frosted window, with the growl of a starving belly gurgling up from below.
Albert offered them a bloodless smile. “Hey, guys.”
“Albert, we just heard about Louise,” Edward said, climbing down from the buggy. “That’s horrible! How are you holding up?”
“We’re so sorry,” Ruth added, dismounting after him with what seemed to be a wince of pain. “Are you doing okay?”
“Not really, no,” Albert sighed, not having the energy to lie for their comfort. “You guys wanna sit down?”
“Yes, thanks,” Edward said, and pulled up a wooden stool.
“I’m okay standing,” said Ruth. “I had a long day at work.”
Albert turned his attention back to the pictures in his lap. “I was just looking at some old photographs of Louise and me.” He held them up for his friends to see. They gazed dutifully at the images, even though they had seen them many times. “This was from the carnival.… Here we are at the town picnic … Oh, and this was the square dance.” His face was an inexpressive mask, much like the faces in the pictures. “Y’know, I almost wish you could smile in photographs. Louise has such an incredible smile.”
“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 aw
ay 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.
“Stop it,” he slurred as he swatted at Ruth’s hand, knocking the reddened cloth to the dusty ground.
“Okay,” she said, “But, you know, you should probably have Doctor Harper take a look at that.”
Albert glared at her with undisguised derision. “Ruth, you’re very sweet, but have you been listening to a goddamn thing I’ve been saying? You know what Doctor Harper’ll say? He’ll say, ‘Oh, let me put a blue jay on that to peck out the blood.’ Hey, wait, y’know what? You guys should have a drink with me. Let’s all have a drink,” he said, his bearing now flush with the confidence of a shit-faced man.
“Maybe some other time,” Ruth said gently.
“I can’t drink,” said Edward. “When I drink, I get really vivid nightmares. I have a glass of whiskey, I fall asleep, and then within twenty minutes I dream somebody shot me in the face.”
But Albert had already forgotten his own suggestion. His face was buried in his hands. “God, my life sucks,” he moaned. “I miss Louise.”
“Well,” Ruth offered, “I don’t know, maybe … maybe you could try talking things over with her.”
Albert’s head snapped upward, giving the illusion of sudden sobriety. “That’s a good idea,” he said. He staggered to his feet with all the stability of a sailor on the deck of a hurricane-stricken vessel.
“Wait, I didn’t mean right now,” Ruth said, grabbing his elbow to steady him.
Albert shook her off brusquely. “No, right now. That’s the best time ever,” he slurred.
He shuffled over to his horse, taking a roundabout figure-eight route. Curtis snorted but stood calmly and patiently as Albert made a valiant effort to get mounted. After three or four attempts, he lost his balance and thudded to the ground with one foot still tangled in a stirrup.
“Listen, Al, why don’t you let us take you home,” Edward said, stepping toward his struggling friend.
“No,” Albert answered firmly. “No, it’s okay, I just need a running start.”
He ambled unevenly away from Curtis, then turned around to face the horse again. He steadied himself and barreled forward once more. He got his foot in the stirrup, leapt up over Curtis’ back … and slid right down the other side, once again crashing into the dirt.
“Oh, God.” Edward flinched. “Hey, Al, come on, you really shouldn’t drink and horse.”
“IgotitIgotitIgotit,” Albert said. And, true to his intention, he finally managed to pull himself up onto his horse’s back, where he lay on his stomach, his arms and legs dangling limply over the side. “Okay, go,” he commanded listlessly, his boots spurring the animal with scant vigor. Curtis, however, knew his owner well enough to take the cue and moved off at a slow trot. Edward and Ruth could hear the receding sound of Albert’s snoring as he disappeared into the night.
With a heavy heart and a heavy liver, Albert ambled toward Louise’s modest white-trimmed cottage. He forced his uncooperative limbs to dismount from Curtis’s back and landed unsteadily, though on his feet this time. “Okay, I’ll be right back, Curtis,” he slurred. “Or not, right? No, no, that’s being too ambitious,” he added, the liquor enabling him to skillfully dodge every consonant of the last word. He hugged Curtis’s long equine nose with both arms. “Y’know, Curtis, we don’t talk enough. We should—let’s fix that. Let’s fix that for sure. I love you, Curtis. I love you so much.” Albert rested his head affectionately on his friend’s furry muzzle …
… and woke up five minutes later in the same position, with a dribble of vomit running from the side of his mouth down toward Curtis’s nostril. He straightened up with a start and wiped off the puke with his sleeve. “Oh, God, Curtis, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry! There we go. All clean. Okay … here we go.” Albert stumbled across the yard to the front door and gave a loud knock. He waited. There was no answer. He knocked again, even louder. After a moment, a light came on somewhere in the back of the house. He heard the padding of approaching footsteps, and Louise opened the door holding a lamp. She blinked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.
“Albert?”
Even unkempt and disheveled with fatigue, she was perfect. The errant strands of hair, the tangled lashes, and the reddened cheek where her head had been resting on her pillow all only served to accentuate her natural beauty. “What the hell are you doing here? It’s almost 1:30,” she rasped.
“Louise, we need to talk,” Albert said, his consonants slippery as a wet porch.
Louise sniffed the air. “Are you drunk?” she asked.
“Oh. Yeah, well—a little. It’s Curtis’s birthday, so we all took him out, and … surprised him.”
“Look, I don’t know what you want from me, but it’s late and I’m going back to bed.” She started to close the door, but Albert thrust out an arm to stop her.
“Louise, I love you,” he said. “And I know we can work this out. I know it. Just—I can be cooler. You’ll see.”
“Albert, no,” she said sternly. “I already told you, it’s over. Now—”
“I’ll fight Charlie Blanche. I’ll do it,” he interrupted.
“I don’t care about that,” she sighed, losing patience.
“Can I come in?” he asked, his body swaying with intoxication. “I’m really drunk, so I’m not gonna be able to get
a boner, but I want us to talk.”
“Albert, get out of here,” she shot back brusquely. “I don’t have anything else to say to you. Listen, I’m sure you’re right for somebody else, just not for me. Now, good night.”
“Louise …” The drunken confidence in his expression fell away, leaving in its wake a pleading look of desperation. “What am I supposed to do without you?”
She regarded him silently for all of three seconds, then closed the door firmly.
He stood by himself, feeling like a wounded animal. “You heartless fuckin’ jerk!” he shouted at the closed door, then immediately covered his bases with a heartfelt “I still love you, though!” He knew the importance of ending on a positive note.
The old prospector looked as if he’d been born a century ago. Although he was barely sixty-five, the hardship of frontier life had put its dusty, rocky foot up his ass over and over, physically aging him far beyond his actual years. His grayish-white beard was scraggly and ill-maintained, and his face was cracked and reddened from years of sun damage, with a side order of alcohol abuse. He traveled with two companions, each one seemingly as old as he was. One was his horse, a solitary old gray who dutifully pulled the little wagon with a comfortable laziness, appearing to admire the landscape as if out for a casual stroll with a favorite gal. The other was a mangy dog of no particular breed that sat next to the old man, panting and swaying back and forth in rhythm with the movement of the wagon. The dog had unkempt floppy ears and a smelly brown matting of fur, patchy and uneven courtesy of innumerable desert battles with fellow furred adversaries.
The only thing that stood out amidst this drab tableau was the object that the prospector held in his hand. It was no bigger than a golf ball, but it screamed out its presence with larger-than-life luster. It was a real, honest-to-God nugget, the first one the prospector had found in all his fifty years of scratching and pawing at the land.
Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West: A Novel Page 3