No Country for Old Men

You do. If you ain't, they'll know it. They'll see it in a heartbeat. I think it's more like what you're willing to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard, and I won't do that. I think now that maybe I never would. The deputy left Chigurh standing in the corner of the office with his hands cuffed behind him, while he sat in the swiveled chair and took off his hat and put his feet up and called Lamar on the mobile. Just walked in the door. Sheriff, he had some sort of thing on him, like one of them oxygen tanks for emphysema or whatever. Then he had a hose that run down the inside of his sleeve and went to one of them stun guns, like they used to slaughterhouse. Yes, sir. Well, that's what it looks like. You can see it when you get in. Yes, sir. I got it covered. Yes, sir. When he stood up out of the chair, he swung the keys off his belt and opened the locked desk drawer to get the keys to the jail. He was slightly bent over when Chigurh squatted and scooted his manacled hands beneath him to the back of his knees. In the same motion, he sat and rocked backward and passed the chain under his feet and then stood instantly and effortlessly. If it looked like a thing he'd practiced many times, it was. He dropped his cuffed hands over the deputy's head and leaped into the air and slammed both knees against the back of the deputy's neck and hauled back on the chain. They went to the floor. The deputy was trying to get his hands inside the chain, but he couldn't. Chigurh lay there, pulling back on the bracelets with his knees between his arms and his face averted. The deputy was flailing wildly and he'd begun to walk sideways over the floor in a circle, kicking over the wastebasket, kicking the chair across the room. He kicked shut the door and he wrapped the throw rug in a wad about them. He was gurgling and bleeding from the mouth. He was strangling on his own blood. Chigurh only hauled the harder. The nickel-plated cuffs bit to the bone. The deputy's right carotid artery burst and a jet of blood shot across the room and hit the wall and ran down it. The deputy's legs slowed and then stopped. He laid jerking. Then he stopped moving altogether. Chigurh lay breathing quietly, holding him. When he got up, he took the keys from the deputy's belt and released himself and put the deputy's revolver in the waistband of his trousers and went into the bathroom. He ran cold water over his wrists until they stopped bleeding and he tore strips from a hand towel with his teeth and wrapped his wrists and went back into the office. He sat on the desk and fastened the toweling with tape from a dispenser, studying the dead man gaping up from the floor. When he was done, he got the deputy's wallet out of his pocket and took the money and put it in the pocket of his shirt and dropped the wallet to the floor. Then he picked up his air tank and the stun gun and walked out the door and got into the deputy's car and started the engine and backed around and pulled out and headed up the road. On the interstate, he picked out a late model Ford sedan with a single driver and turned on the lights and hit the siren briefly. The car pulled onto the shoulder. Chigurh pulled in behind him and shut off the engine and slung the tank across his shoulder and stepped out. The man was watching him in the rearview mirror as he walked up. The man opened the door and stepped out. The man stepped away from the vehicle. Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this blood-stained figure before him, but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man's head like a faith he had. Chigurh looked at him and said, Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this blood-stained figure before him, but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man's head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes, carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see. Chigurh wiped his hand with his handkerchief. I just didn't want you to get blood on the car, he said. Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve-powered German binoculars. His hat pushed back on his head, elbows propped on his knees. The rifle strapped over his shoulder with a harnessed leather sling was a heavy-barreled .270 on a 98 Mauser action with a laminated stalk of maple and walnut. It carried a unertile telescopic sight of the same power as the binoculars. The antelope were a little under a mile away. The sun was up less than an hour, and the shadow of the ridge and the vatilla and the rocks fell far out across the floodplain below him. Somewhere out there was the shadow of Moss himself. He lowered the binoculars and sat studying the land. Far to the south, the raw mountains of Mexico, the breaks of the river. To the west, the baked terracotta terrain of the running borderlands. He spat dryly and wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his cotton work shirt. The rifle would shoot half-minute of angle groups, five-inch groups at one thousand yards. The spot he'd picked to shoot from lay just below a long talus of lava scree, and it would put him well within that distance. Except that it would take the better part of an hour to get there, and the antelope were grazing away from him. The best he could say about any of it was that there was no wind. When he got to the foot of the talus, he raised himself, slowly, and looked for the antelope. They'd not moved far from where he'd last saw them, but the shot was still a good seven hundred yards. He studied the animals through the binoculars. In the compressed air moats and heat distortion, a low haze of shimmering dust and pollen, there was no other cover and there wasn't going to be any other shot. He wallowed down in the scree and pulled off one boot and laid it over the rocks and lowered the forearm of the rifle down into the leather and pushed off the safety with his thumb and sighted through the scope. They stood with their heads up, all of them, looking at him. Damn, he whispered. The sun was behind him, so they couldn't very well have seen light reflect off the glass of the scope. They'd just flat seen him. The rifle had a Kanjar trigger set to nine ounces and he pulled the rifle and the boot toward him with great care and sighted again and jacked the crosshairs slightly up the back of the animal standing most broadly to him. He knew the exact drop of the bullet in hundred-yard increments. It was the distance that was uncertain. He laid his finger in the curve of the trigger. The boar's tooth he wore on a gold chain spooled onto the rocks inside his elbow. Even with the heavy barrel and the muzzle brake, the rifle bucked up off the rest. When he pulled the animals back into the scope, he could see them all standing as before. It took the hundred-fifty grain bullet the better part of a second to get there, but it took the sound twice that. They were standing, looking at the plume of dust where the bullet had hit. Then they bolted. Running almost immediately at top speed, out upon the barial with the long wang of the rifle shot rolling after them and caroming off the rocks and yawing back across the open country in the early morning solitude. He stood and watched them go. He raised the glasses. One of the animals had dropped back and was packing one leg and he thought that the round had probably skipped off the pan and caught him in the left hindquarters. He leaned and spat. Damn, he said. He watched them out of sight beyond the rocky headlands to the south. The pale orange dust that hung in the windless morning light grew faint and then it too was gone. The barial stood silent and empty in the sun as if nothing had occurred there at all. He sat and pulled on his boot and picked up the rifle and ejected the spent casing and put it in his shirt pocket and closed the bolt. Then he slung the rifle over his shoulder and set out. It took him some forty minutes to cross the barial. From there he made his way up a long volcanic slope and followed the crest of the ridge southeast to an overlook above the country into which the animals had vanished. He glassed the terrain slowly. Crossing that ground was a large tailless dog, black in color. He watched it. It had a huge head and cropped ears and it was limping badly. It paused and said,