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- He was 19. And he told me that he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember.
- I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind.
- What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal.
- The sun was up less than an hour and the shadow of the ridge and the datilla 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 workshirt.
- The pale orange dust that hung in the windless morning light grew faint and then it too was gone. The barrial stood silent and empty in the sun. As if nothing had occurred there at all.
- ...two more bodies lying in the gaunt yellow grass. Dried blood black on the ground. He stopped and listened. Nothing. The drone of flies.
- His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.
- When he woke it was 1:06 by the digital clock on the bedside table. He lay there looking at the ceiling, the raw glare of the vaporlamp outside bathing the bedroom in a cold and bluish light. Like a winter moon. Or some other kind of moon. Something stellar and alien in its light that he’d come to feel comfortable with. Anything but sleep in the dark.
- He kept the truck in two wheel drive and drove in second gear. The light of the unrisen moon before him spread out along the dark placard hills like scrimlights in a theatre. (...) When the moon did rise it sat swollen and pale and ill formed among the hills to light up all the land about and he turned off the headlights of the truck.
- Dead quiet. Could be because of the moon. His own shadow was more company than he would have liked. Ugly feeling out here. A trespasser. Among the dead.
- The moon was already a quarter ways up. All but day bright. He felt like something in a jar.
- He studied the blue floodplain out there in the silence. A vast and breathless amphitheatre. Waiting. He’d had this feeling before. In another country. He never thought he’d have it again.
- _The first long panes of light were standing through a gap in the mountains to the east and fanning over the country before him. The truck was ablaze with lights, roof rack and bumper spots. The engine kept racing away into a howl where the wheels left the ground.
- The cold wind blowing off the water smelled of iron. He could taste it.
- Where he crested out the country lay dead flat, stretching away to the south and to the east. Red dirt and creosote. Mountains in the far and middle distance. Nothing out there. Heatshimmer.
- Cold yellow eye dead to the blue vault above them.
- He looked haggard. He looked at Bell and he looked at the ground. He shook his head and looked away. I used to play mumbledypeg here when I was a boy. Right here. These youngsters today I dont think would even know what that was.
- Chigurh took a twenty-five cent piece from his pocket and flipped it spinning into the bluish glare of the fluorescent lights overhead. He caught it and slapped it onto the back of his forearm just above the bloody wrappings. Call it, he said.
- The man looked at Chigurh’s eyes for the first time. Blue as lapis. At once glistening and totally opaque. Like wet stones. You need to call it, Chigurh said. I cant call it for you. It wouldnt be fair. It wouldnt even be right. Just call it.
- Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?
- I dont know that law enforcement benefits all that much from new technology. Tools that comes into our hands comes into theirs too.
- It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all.
- You wouldnt think a car would burn like that.
- When they got to the car it was just a blackened hulk.
- He went into the livingroom and sat on the sofa. There was a perfectly good 21 inch television on the table. He looked at himself in the dead gray screen.
- Outside he stood on the broken oilstained pavement.
- When he woke it was late afternoon. He lay there looking at the stained asbestos ceiling.
- The evening was soft and warm and in the little alameda grackles were settling in the trees and calling to one another.
- He sat on a gravel beach with the empty bag folded in his lap and watched the sun set. Watched the land turn blue and cold. An osprey went down the lake. Then there was just the darkness.
- The bodies were bloated in their clothes.
- Cool air coming in off the lake.
- The shotgun made a strange deep chugging sound. Like someone coughing into a barrel.
- He’d slept a good part of the way in the back of the cab and he only woke when they slowed coming off the highway and down Main Street. He watched the pale white globes of the streetlamps pass along the upper rim of the window. Then he sat up.
- Light from the streetlamps coming through the lace curtains at the window.
- He thought about a lot of things but the thing that stayed with him was that at some point he was going to have to quit running on luck.
- It had already occurred to him that he would probably never be safe again in his life and he wondered if that was something that you got used to. And if you did?
- The whole room was pulsing slowly. There was an odd smell in the air. Like some foreign cologne. A medicinal edge to it. Everything humming. Moss held the shotgun at his waist with the hammer cocked. There was nothing that could happen that would have surprised him. He felt as if he weighed nothing. He felt as if he were floating. The man didnt even look at him. He seemed oddly untroubled. As if this were all part of his day.
- The man turned his head and gazed at Moss. Blue eyes. Serene. Dark hair. Something about him faintly exotic. Beyond Moss’s experience.
- Moss felt something tug at the bag on his shoulder. The pistolshot was just a muffled pop, flat and small in the dark quiet of the town. He turned in time to see the muzzleflash of the second shot faint but visible under the pink glow of the fifteen foot high neon hotel sign. He didnt feel anything. The bullet snapped at his shirt and blood started running down his upper arm and he was already at a dead run. With the next shot he felt a stinging pain in his side. He fell down and got up again leaving Chigurh’s shotgun lying in the street. Damn, he said. What a shot.
- He crossed Ryan Street with blood sloshing in his boots.
- In the center a wrought-iron gazebo or bandstand. He collapsed on one of the iron benches with the bag on the bench beside him and leaned forward holding himself. Globes of orange light hung from the lampstands. The world receding. Across from the park was a church. It seemed far away. The grackles creaked and swayed in the branches overhead and day was coming.
- A rich tang of gunpowder on the cool morning air. Like the smell of fireworks. No sound anywhere.
- He looked at Chigurh. He looked at the new day paling all about. Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world.
- Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that’s what it is. It’s the thing you’re talkin about. I’ve heard it compared to the rock—maybe in the bible—and I wouldnt disagree with that. But it’ll be here even when the rock is gone.
- He got a city map at the quickstop and spread it out on the seat of the cruiser while he drank coffee out of a styrofoam cup. He traced his route on the map with a yellow marker from the glovebox and refolded the map and laid it on the seat beside him and switched off the domelight and started the engine.
- He sipped his coffee. The face that lapped and shifted in the dark liquid in the cup seemed an omen of things to come. Things losing shape. Taking you with them. He set the cup down and looked at the girl.
- Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change. I’d have to say he’d be the first.
- You care if I smoke? she said. (-) I think we’re still in America.
- She put her cigarettes in her purse and looked at him. I’ll tell you somethin, Sheriff. 19 is old enough to know that if you have got somethin that means the world to you it’s all that more likely it’ll get took away. Sixteen was, for that matter. I think about that.
- There’s days I’m in favor of givin the whole damn place back to em, the sheriff said.
- Driving back to Sanderson it began to snow. He went to the courthouse and did some paperwork and left just before dark. When he pulled up in the driveway behind the house his wife was looking out from the kitchen window. She smiled at him. The falling snow drifted and turned in the warm yellow light.
- Wires must be down. (-) She smiled. I think it’s just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think. (-) Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then.
- The office was on the seventeenth floor with a view over the skyline of Houston and the open lowlands to the ship channel and the bayou beyond. Colonies of silver tanks. Gas flares, pale in the day.
- When he woke it was almost dark. He rose and went to the window and pushed back the old lace curtain. Lights in the street. Long reefs of dull red cloud racked over the darkening western horizon. Roofs in a low and squalid skyline.
- You cant make a deal with him. Let me say it again. Even if you gave him the money he’d still kill you. There’s no one alive on this planet that’s ever had even a cross word with him. They’re all dead. These are not good odds. He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.
- When he climbed out of the tub the water was a pale pink and the holes in his leg were still leaking a pale blood dilute with serum.
- He stopped at the cafe and got a coffee to go and walked out to the cruiser as the flatbed was coming up the street. Powdered over with the gray desert dust. He stopped and watched it and then got in the cruiser and wheeled around and drove past the truck and pulled it over. When he got out and walked back the driver was sitting at the wheel chewing gum and watching him with a sort of goodnatured arrogance.
- He pulled out onto the highway again. The sun pooled in the low blue hills before him. Bleeding slowly away. A cool and shadowed twilight falling over the desert. He took off his sunglasses and put them in the glovebox and closed the glovebox door and turned on the headlights. As he did so the box began to beep with a slow measured time.
- You think you’re outside of everything, Wells said. But you’re not. (-) Not everything. No. (-) You’re not outside of death. (-) It doesnt mean to me what it does to you. (-) You think I’m afraid to die? (-) Yes. (-) Just do it. Do it and goddamn you. (-) It’s not the same, Chigurh said. You’ve been giving up things for years to get here. I dont think I even understood that. How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? We’re in the same line of work. Up to a point. Did you hold me in such contempt? Why would you do that? How did you let yourself get in this situation? (-) Wells looked out at the street. What time is it? he said.
- Sometimes you have a little problem and you dont fix it and then all of a sudden it aint a little problem anymore.
- When they got to the bus station it was just breaking daylight, gray and cold and a light rain falling.
- A bare formica and chrome table in the center of the room with a box of cereal standing on it. The shadow of the kitchen window lying on the linoleum floor.
- He took off his hat and passed his wet hand through his hair and looked up at the windmill. He looked out at the slow dark elliptic of the blades turning in the dry and windbent grass. A low wooden trundling under his feet. Then he just stood there paying the brim of his hat slowly through his fingers. The posture of a man perhaps who has just buried something. I dont know a damn thing, he said.
- One of the things you realize about gettin older is that not everbody is goin to get older with you.
- A crooked peace officer is just a damned abomination. That’s all you can say about it. He’s ten times worse than the criminal.
- 3 weeks ago I was a law abidin citizen. Workin a nine to five job. Eight to four, anyways. Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.
- When the shootin starts would you rather be armed or be legal?
- I think maybe that’s the point. There’s a road goin to California and there’s one comin back.
- After a while he said: It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I’m sayin? (...) I know you dont but let me try it one more time. You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there? (-) She nodded. (-) You understand what I’m sayin? (-) I understand that. I been there.
- Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else. Probably the best way is to be from Mars.
- Bell nodded. He looked at the witness. The witness had asked for a cigarette and he lit it and sat smoking. He looked pretty comfortable. He looked as if he’d sat in the back of police cruisers before.
- Can you feel it when someone is watching you? A lot of people thought so.
- My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done somethin wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Dont haul stuff around with you. I guess all that sounds pretty simple today. Even to me. All the more reason to think about it. He didnt say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say.
- They walked out into the street where the vehicles sat steaming. The streetlamps had come on. A pool of green antifreeze was collecting in the gutter.
- I think by the time you’re grown you’re as happy as you’re goin to be. You’ll have good times and bad times, but in the end you’ll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I’ve knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.
- All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it. ...Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. I was too young for one war and too old for the next one. But I seen what come out of it. You can be patriotic and still believe that some things cost more than what they’re worth. Ask them Gold Star mothers what they paid and what they got for it. You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise. You’ll see. Maybe you done have.
- Bell tried to think about his life. Then he tried not to.
- I didnt know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasnt mine. It never has been.
- I think sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all. When I told it, well it took a shape I would not have guessed it to have and in that way he was right too. It was like a ballplayer told me one time he said that if he had some slight injury and it bothered him a little bit, nagged at him, he generally played better. It kept his mind focused on one thing instead of a hundred. I can understand that. Not that it changes anything.
- Harold didnt get no medal. He just come home in a wooden box.
- I stood out there a long time and I thought about things. It was one of them warm days you get in the winter sometimes. A little wind. I still keep thinkin maybe it is somethin about the country. Sort of the way Ellis said. I thought about my family and about him out there in his wheelchair in the old house and it just seemed to me that this country has got a strange kind of history and a damned bloody one too.
- He turned and looked at me. And then I thought he looked a lot older. His eyes looked old. He said: People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake. We didnt have nothin to give to em to take over there. If we’d sent em without rifles I dont know as they’d of been all that much worse off. You cant go to war like that. You cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes. I surely dont.
- I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you’re just too close to it. It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is somethin I dont want to be wrong about.
- There’s two kinds of people that dont ask a lot of questions. One is too dumb to and the other dont need to.
- She was riding along a red dirt ridge to the south sitting with her hands crossed on the pommel, looking toward the last of the sun, the horse slogging slowly through the loose sandy dirt, the red stain of it following them in the still air. That’s my heart yonder, he told the horse. It always was.
- I think I know where we’re headed. We’re bein bought with our own money. And it aint just the drugs. There is fortunes bein accumulated out there that they dont nobody even know about. What do we think is goin to come of that money? Money that can buy whole countries. It done has. Can it buy this one? I dont think so. But it will put you in bed with people you ought not to be there with. It’s not even a law enforcement problem. I doubt that it ever was. There’s always been narcotics. But people dont just up and decide to dope theirselves for no reason. By the millions. I dont have no answer about that. In particular I dont have no answer to take heart from. I told a reporter here a while back—young girl, seemed nice enough. She was just tryin to be a reporter. She said: Sheriff how come you to let crime get so out of hand in your county? Sounded like a fair question I reckon. Maybe it was a fair question. Anyway I told her, I said: It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight. I told her, I said: It reaches into ever strata. You’ve heard about that aint you? Ever strata? You finally get into the sort of breakdown in mercantile ethics that leaves people settin around out in the desert dead in their vehicles and by then it’s just too late. (-) She give me kindly a funny look. So the last thing I told her, and maybe I shouldnt of said it, I told her that you cant have a dope business without dopers. A lot of em are well dressed and holdin down goodpayin jobs too. I said: You might even know some yourself.
- Some men could put their arms around a crying woman but it never felt natural to him.
- He couldnt name the feeling. It was sadness but it was something else besides. And the something else besides was what had him sitting there instead of starting the truck. He’d felt like this before but not in a long time and when he said that, then he knew what it was. It was defeat. It was being beaten. More bitter to him than death.
jul 8 2020 ∞
jul 8 2020 +
jul 8 2020 +