The driver studied him. Moss leaned on the window. Can you take me across the bridge? he said.
To the other side.
Yes. To the other side.
You got monies.
Yes. I got monies.
The driver looked dubious. Twenty dollars, he said.
Okay.
At the gate the guard leaned down and regarded him where he sat in the dim rear of the cab. What country were you born in? he said.
The United States.
What are you bringing in?
Not anything.
The guard studied him. Would you mind stepping out here? he said.
Moss pushed down on the doorhandle and leaned on the front seat to ease himself out of the cab. He stood.
What happened to your shoes?
I dont know.
You dont have any clothes on, do you?
I got clothes on.
The second guard was waving the cars past. He pointed for the cabdriver. Would you please pull your cab over into that second space there?
The driver put the cab in gear.
Would you mind stepping away from the vehicle?
Moss stepped away. The cab pulled into the parking area and the driver cut the engine. Moss looked at the guard. The guard seemed to be waiting for him to say something but he didnt.
They took him inside and sat him in a steel chair in a small white office. Another man came in and stood leaning against a steel desk. He looked him over.
How much have you had to drink?
I aint had anything to drink.
What happened to you?
What do you mean?
What happened to your clothes.
I dont know.
Do you have any identification?
No.
Nothing.
No.
The man leaned back, his arms crossed at his chest. He said: Who do you think gets to go through this gate into the United States of America?
I dont know. American citizens.
Some American citizens. Who do you think decides that?
You do I reckon.
That's correct. And how do I decide?
I dont know.
I ask questions. If I get sensible answers then they get to go to America. If I dont get sensible answers they dont. Is there anything about that that you dont understand?
No sir.
Then maybe you'd like to start over.
All right.
We need to hear more about why you're out here with no clothes on.
I got a overcoat on.
Are you jackin with me?
No sir.
Dont jack with me. Are you in the service?
No sir. I'm a veteran.
What branch of the service.
United States Army.
Were you in Nam?
Yessir. Two tours.
What outfit.
Twelfth Infantry.
What were your dates of tour duty.
August seventh nineteen and sixty-six to September second nineteen and sixty-eight.
The man watched him for some time. Moss looked at him and looked away. He looked toward the door, the empty hall. Sitting hunched forward in the overcoat with his elbows on his knees.
Are you all right?
Yessir. I'm all right. I got a wife that'll come and get me if you all will let me go on.
Have you got any money? You got change for a phone call?
Yessir.
He heard claws scrabbling on the tiles. A guard was standing there with a German Shepherd on a lead. The man jutted his chin at the guard. Get someone to help this man. He needs to get into town. Is the taxi gone?
Yessir. It was clean.
I know. Get someone to help him.
He looked at Moss. Where are you from?
I'm from San Saba Texas.
Does your wife know where you are?
Yessir. I talked to her here just a while ago.
Did you all have a fight?
Did who have a fight?
You and your wife.
Well. Somewhat of a one I reckon. Yessir.
You need to tell her you're sorry.
Sir?
I said you need to tell her you're sorry.
Yessir. I will.
Even if you think it was her fault.
Yessir.
Go on. Get your ass out of here.
Yessir.
Sometimes you have a little problem and you dont fix it and then all of a sudden it aint a little problem anymore. You understand what I'm tellin you?
Yessir. I do.
Go on.
Yessir.
It was almost daylight and the cab was long gone. He set out up the street. A bloody serum was leaking from his wound and it was running down the inside of his leg. People paid him little mind. He turned up Adams Street and stopped at a clothing store and peered in. Lights were on at the rear. He knocked at the door and waited and knocked again. Finally a small man in a white shirt and a black tie opened the door and looked out at him. I know you aint open, Moss said, but I need some clothes real bad. The man nodded and swung open the door. Come in, he said.
They walked side by side down the aisle toward the boot section. Tony Lama, Justin, Nocona. There were some low chairs there and Moss eased himself down and sat with his hands gripping the chair arms. I need boots and some clothes, he said. I got some medical problems and I dont want to walk around no more than what I can help.
The man nodded. Yessir, he said. Of course.
Do you carry the Larry Mahans?
No sir. We dont.
That's all right. I need a pair of Wrangler jeans thirty-two by thirty-four length. A shirt size large. Some socks. And show me some Nocona boots in a ten and a half. And I need a belt.
Yessir. Did you want to look at hats?
Moss looked across the store. I think a hat would be good. You got any of them stockman's hats with the small brim? Seven and three-eights?
Yes we do. We have a three X beaver in the Resistol and a little better grade in the Stetson. A five X, I think it is.
Let me see the Stetson. That silverbelly color.
All right sir. Are white socks all right?
White socks is all I wear.
What about underwear?
Maybe a pair of jockey shorts. Thirty-two. Or medium.
Yessir. You just make yourself comfortable. Are you all right?
I'm all right.
The man nodded and turned to go.
Can I ask you somethin? Moss said.
Yessir.
Do you get a lot of people come in here with no clothes on?
No sir. I wouldnt say a lot.
He carried the pile of new clothing with him to the dressingroom and slid off the coat and hung it from the hook on the back of the door. A pale dried blood was crusted across his sallow sunken paunch. He pushed at the edges of the tape but they wouldnt stick. He eased himself down on the wooden bench and pulled on the socks and he opened the package of shorts and took them out and pulled them over his feet and up to his knees and then stood and pulled them carefully up over the dressing. He sat again and undid the shirt from its cardboard forms and endless pins.
When he came out of the dressingroom he had the coat over his arm. He walked up and down the creaking wooden aisle. The clerk stood looking down at the boots. The lizard takes longer to break in, he said.
Yeah. Hot in the summer too. These are all right. Let's try that hat. I aint been duded up like this since I got out of the army.
The sheriff sipped his coffee and set the cup back down in the same ring on the glass desktop that he'd taken it from. They're fixin to close the hotel, he said.
Bell nodded. I aint surprised.
They all quit. That feller hadnt pulled but two shifts. I blame myself. Never occurred to me that the son of a bitch would come back. I just never even imagined such a thing.
He might never of left.
I thought about t
hat too.
The reason nobody knows what he looks like is that they dont none of em live long enough to tell it.
This is a goddamned homicidal lunatic, Ed Tom.
Yeah. I dont think he's a lunatic though.
Well what would you call him?
I dont know. When are they fixin to close it?
It's done closed, as far as that goes.
You got a key?
Yeah. I got a key. It's a crime scene.
Why dont we go over there and look around some more.
All right. We can do that.
The first thing they saw was the transponder unit sitting on a windowsill in the hallway. Bell picked it up and turned it in his hand, looking at the dial and the knobs.
That aint a goddamn bomb is it Sheriff?
No.
That's all we need.
It's a trackin device.
So whatever it was they was trackin they found.
Probably. How long has it been settin there do you reckon?
I dont know. I think I might be able to guess what they were trackin, though.
Maybe, Bell said. There's somethin about this whole deal that dont rattle right.
It aint supposed to.
We got a ex-army colonel here with most of his head gone that you had to ID off of his fingerprints. What fingers wasnt shot off. Regular army. Fourteen years service. Not a piece of paper on him.
He'd been robbed.
Yeah.
What do you know about this that you aint tellin, Sheriff?
You got the same facts I got.
I aint talkin about facts. Do you think this whole mess has moved south?
Bell shook his head. I dont know.
You got a dog in this hunt?
Not really. A couple of kids from my county that might be sort of involved that ought not to be.
Sort of involved.
Yeah.
Are we talkin kin?
No. Just people from my county. People I'm supposed to be lookin after.
He handed the transponder unit to the sheriff.
What am I supposed to do with this?
It's Maverick County property. Crime scene evidence.
The sheriff shook his head. Dope, he said.
Dope.
They sell that shit to schoolkids.
It's worse than that.
How's that?
Schoolkids buy it.
VII
I wont talk about the war neither. I was supposed to be a war hero and I lost a whole squad of men. Got decorated for it. They died and I got a medal. I dont even need to know what you think about that. There aint a day I dont remember it. Some boys I know come back they went on to school up at Austin on the GI Bill, they had hard things to say about their people. Some of em did. Called em a bunch of rednecks and all such as that. Didnt like their politics. Two generations in this country is a long time. You're talkin about the early settlers. I used to tell em that havin your wife and children killed and scalped and gutted like fish has a tendency to make some people irritable but they didnt seem to know what I was talkin about. I think the sixties in this country sobered some of em up. I hope it did. I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.
Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.
Chigurh limped up the seventeen flights of concrete steps in the cool concrete well and when he got to the steel door on the landing he shot the cylinder out of the lock with the plunger of the stungun and opened the door and stepped into the hallway and shut the door behind him. He stood leaning against the door with the shotgun in both hands, listening. Breathing no harder than if he'd just got up out of a chair. He went down the hallway and picked the crushed cylinder out of the floor and put it in his pocket and went on to the elevator and stood listening again. He took off his boots and stood them by the elevator door and went down the hallway in his sockfeet, walking slowly, favoring his wounded leg.
The doors to the office were open onto the hallway. He stopped. He thought that perhaps the man did not see his own shadow on the outer hallway wall, illdefined but there. Chigurh thought it an odd oversight but he knew that fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world. He slipped the strap from his shoulder and lowered the airtank to the floor. He studied the stance of the man's shadow framed there by the light from the smoked glass window behind him. He pushed the shotgun's follower slightly back with the heel of his hand to check the chambered round and pushed the safety off.
The man was holding a small pistol at the level of his belt. Chigurh stepped into the doorway and shot him in the throat with a load of number ten shot. The size collectors use to take bird specimens. The man fell back through his swivelchair knocking it over and went to the floor and lay there twitching and gurgling. Chigurh picked up the smoking shotgun shell from the carpet and put it in his pocket and walked into the room with the pale smoke still drifting from the canister fitted to the end of the sawed-off barrel. He walked around behind the desk and stood looking down at the man. The man was lying on his back and he had one hand over his throat but the blood was pumping steadily through his fingers and out onto the rug. His face was full of small holes but his right eye seemed intact and he looked up at Chigurh and tried to speak from out of his bubbling mouth. Chigurh dropped to one knee and leaned on the shotgun and looked at him. What is it? he said. What are you trying to tell me?
The man moved his head. The blood gurgled in his throat.
Can you hear me? Chigurh said.
He didnt answer.
I'm the man you sent Carson Wells to kill. Is that what you wanted to know?
He watched him. He was wearing a blue nylon runningsuit and a pair of white leather shoes. Blood was starting to pool about his head and he was shivering as if he were cold.
The reason I used the birdshot was that I didnt want to break the glass. Behind you. To rain glass on people in the street. He nodded toward the window where the man's upper silhouette stood outlined in the small gray pockmarks the lead had left in the glass. He looked at the m
an. The man's hand had gone slack at his throat and the blood had slowed. He looked at the pistol lying there. He rose and pushed the safety back on the shotgun and stepped past the man to the window and inspected the pockings the lead had made. When he looked down at the man again the man was dead. He crossed the room and stood at the doorway listening. He went out and down the hall and collected his tank and the stungun and got his boots and stepped into them and pulled them up. Then he walked down the corridor and went out through the metal door and down the concrete steps to the garage where he'd left his vehicle.
When they got to the bus station it was just breaking daylight, gray and cold and a light rain falling. She leaned forward over the seat and paid the driver and gave him a two dollar tip. He got out and went around to the trunk and opened it and got their bags and set them in the portico and brought the walker around to her mother's side and opened the door. Her mother turned and began to struggle out into the rain.
Mama will you wait? I need to get around there.
I knowed this is what it would come to, the mother said. I said it three year ago.
It aint been three years.
I used them very words.
Just wait till I get around there.
In the rain, her mother said. She looked up at the cabdriver. I got cancer, she said. Now look at this. Not even a home to go to.
Yes mam.
We're goin to El Paso Texas. You know how many people I know in El Paso Texas?
No mam.
She paused with her arm on the door and held up her hand and made an O with her thumb and forefinger. That's how many, she said.
Yes mam.
They sat in the coffeeshop surrounded by their bags and parcels and stared out at the rain and at the idling buses. At the gray day breaking. She looked at her mother. Did you want some more coffee? she said.
The old woman didnt answer.
You aint speakin, I reckon.
I dont know what there is to speak about.
Well I dont guess I do either.
Whatever you all done you done. I dont know why I ought to have to run from the law.
We aint runnin from the law, Mama.
You couldnt call on em to help you though, could you?
Call on who?
The law.
No. We couldnt.
That's what I thought.
The old woman adjusted her teeth with her thumb and stared out the window. After a while the bus came. The driver stowed her walker in the luggage bay under the bus and they helped her up the steps and put her in the first seat. I got cancer, she told the driver.
Carla Jean put their bags in the bin overhead and sat down. The old woman didnt look at her. Three years ago, she said. You didnt have to have no dream about it. No revelation nor nothin. I dont give myself no credit. Anybody could of told you the same thing.