No Country For Old Men

Whatever you call it.

The sort of people I contract with like to keep a low profile. They dont like to get involved in things that draw attention. They dont like things in the paper.

I'll bet.

This isnt going to go away. Even if you got lucky and took out one or two people – which is unlikely – they'd just send someone else. Nothing would change. They'll still find you. There's nowhere to go. You can add to your troubles the fact that the people who were delivering the product dont have that either. So guess who they're looking at? Not to mention the DEA and various other law enforcement agencies. Everybody's list has got the same name on it. And it's the only name on it. You need to throw me a bone. I dont really have any reason to protect you.

Are you afraid of this guy?

Wells shrugged. Wary is the word I'd use.

You didnt mention Bell.

Bell. All right?

I take it you dont think much of him.

I dont think of him at all. He's a redneck sheriff in a hick town in a hick county. In a hick state. Let me get the nurse. You're not very comfortable. This is my number. I want you to think it over. What we talked about.

He stood and put a card on the table next to the flowers. He looked at Moss. You think you wont call me but you will. Just dont wait too long. That money belongs to my client. Chigurh is an outlaw. Time's not on your side. We can even let you keep some of it. But if I have to recover the funds from Chigurh then it will be too late for you. Not to mention your wife.

Moss didnt answer.

All right. You might want to call her. When I talked to her she sounded pretty worried.

When he was gone Moss turned up the photographs lying on the bed. Like a player checking his hole cards. He looked at the pitcher of water but then the nurse came in.

VI

Young people anymore they seem to have a hard time growin up. I dont know why. Maybe it's just that you dont grow up any faster than what you have to. I had a cousin was a deputized peace officer when he was eighteen. He was married and had a kid at the time. I had a friend that I grew up with was a ordained Baptist preacher at the same age. Pastor of a little old country church. He left there to go to Lubbock after about three years and when he told em he was leavin they just set there in that church and blubbered. Men and women alike. He'd married em and baptized em and buried em. He was twenty-one years old, maybe twenty-two. When he preached they'd be standin out in the yard listenin. It surprised me. He was always quiet in school. I was twenty-one when I went in the army and I was one of the oldest in our class at boot camp. Six months later I was in France shootin people with a rifle. I didnt even think it was all that peculiar at the time. Four years later I was sheriff of this county. I never doubted but what I was supposed to be neither. People anymore you talk about right and wrong they're liable to smile at you. But I never had a lot of doubts about things like that. In my thoughts about things like that. I hope I never do.

Loretta told me that she had heard on the radio about some percentage of the children in this country bein raised by their grandparents. I forget what it was. Pretty high, I thought. Parents wouldnt raise em. We talked about that. What we thought was that when the next generation come along and they dont want to raise their children neither then who is goin to do it? Their own parents will be the only grandparents around and they wouldnt even raise them. We didnt have a answer about that. On my better days I think that there is somethin I dont know or there is somethin that I'm leavin out. But them times are seldom. I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train. I dont know what is the use of me layin awake over it. But I do.

I dont believe you could do this job without a wife. A pretty unusual wife at that. Cook and jailer and I dont know what all. Them boys dont know how good they've got it. Well, maybe they do. I never worried about her bein safe. They get fresh garden stuff a good part of the year. Good cornbread. Soupbeans. She's been known to fix em hamburgers and french fries. We've had em to come back even years later and they'd be married and doin good. Bring their wives. Bring their kids even. They didnt come back to see me. I've seen em to introduce their wives or their sweethearts and then just go to bawlin. Grown men. That had done some pretty bad things. She knew what she was doin. She always did. So we go over budget on the jail ever month but what are you goin to do about that? You aint goin to do nothin about it. That's what you're goin to do.

Chigurh pulled off of the highway at the junction of 131 and opened the telephone directory in his lap and folded over the bloodstained pages till he got to veterinarian. There was a clinic outside Bracketville about thirty minutes away. He looked at the towel around his leg. It was soaked through with blood and blood had soaked into the seat. He threw the directory in the floor and sat with his hands at the top of the steering wheel. He sat there for about three minutes. Then he put the vehicle in gear and pulled out onto the highway again.

He drove to the crossroads at La Pryor and took the road north to Uvalde. His leg was throbbing like a pump. On the highway outside of Uvalde he pulled up in front of the Cooperative and undid the sashcord from around his leg and pulled away the towel. Then he got out and hobbled in.

He bought a sack full of veterinary supplies. Cotton and tape and gauze. A bulb syringe and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. A pair of forceps. Scissors. Some packets of four inch swabs and a quart bottle of Betadine. He paid and went out and got in the Ramcharger and started the engine and then sat watching the building in the rearview mirror. As if he might be thinking of something else he needed, but that wasnt it. He put his fingers inside the cuff of his shirt and carefully blotted the sweat from his eyes. Then he put the vehicle in gear and backed out of the parking space and pulled out onto the highway headed toward town.

He drove down Main Street and turned north on Getty and east again on Nopal where he parked and shut off the engine. His leg was still bleeding. He got the scissors from the bag and the tape and he cut a three inch round disc out of the cardboard box that held the cotton. He put that together with the tape into his shirtpocket. He took a coathanger from the floor behind the seat and twisted the ends off and straightened it out. Then he leaned and opened his bag and took out a shirt and cut off one sleeve with the scissors and folded it and put it in his pocket and put the scissors back in the paper bag from the Cooperative and opened the door and eased himself down, lifting his injured leg out with both hands under his knee. He stood there, holding on to the door. Then he bent over with his head to his chest and stood that way for the better part of a minute. Then he raised up and shut the door and started down the street.

Outside the drugstore on Main he stopped and turned and leaned against a car parked there. He checked the street. No one coming. He unscrewed the gascap at his elbow and hooked the shirtsleeve over the coathanger and ran it down into the tank and drew it out again. He taped the cardboard over the open gastank and balled the sleeve wet with gasoline over the top of it and taped it down and lit it and turned and limped into the drugstore. He was little more than halfway down the aisle toward the pharmacy when the car outside exploded into flame taking out most of the glass in front of the store.

He let himself in through the little gate and went down the pharmacist's aisles. He found a packet of syringes and a bottle of Hydrocodone tablets and he came back up the aisle looking for penicillin. He couldnt find it but he found tetracycline and sulfa. He stuffed these things in his pocket and came out from behind the counter in the orange glow of the fire and went down the aisle and picked up a pair of aluminum crutches and pushed open the rear door and went hobbling out across the gravel parking lot behind the store. The alarm at the rear door went off but no one paid any attention and Chigurh never had even glanced toward the front of the store which was now in flames.

He pulled into a motel outside of Hondo and got a room at the end of the building and walked in and set his bag on the bed. He shoved the pistol under the pillow and went in the bathroom with the bag from the Cooperative and dumped the contents out into the sink. He emptied his pockets and laid out everything on the counter-keys, billfold, the vials of antibiotic and the syringes. He sat on the edge of the tub and pulled off his boots and reached