Summary
Chigurh arrives at the office of an unnamed man, and the man's secretary buzzes him in. There, in his office, Chigurh presents him with what remains of the money that Llewelyn found at the beginning of the novel. At first the man is wary of Chigurh. Chigurh's reputation precedes him, and the man is suspicious that perhaps he's in grave danger. But Chigurh assures him that he wants nothing more than to go into business together, suggesting that the men that he previously trusted with his money were clearly not sufficient for the job.
Carla Jean's grandmother's funeral takes place in Odessa shortly after Llewelyn dies. Mama dies from cancer, though it's unclear whether she dies in Odessa or while she and Carla Jean were still hiding out in El Paso. When Carla Jean returns home after the funeral, she finds Anton Chigurh waiting for her in the bedroom, sitting in the dark. Chigurh explains that he offered Llewelyn a chance to spare her life, but he turned it down in favor of facing off with Chigurh himself. Chigurh then monologues about fate and predestination. Carla Jean lightly pleads for him to spare her life, and he flips a coin and tells her to call it. She calls heads, but the coin lands on tails, so he shoots her.
When Chigurh leaves Carla Jean's house, his car is t-boned at a country intersection. He crawls out of the car, badly hurt, his arm broken and bleeding with exposed bones. He's also bleeding from his head. He stops two boys and pays one of them for his shirt and their silence, trying to ensure that they don't describe his appearance to the authorities when they arrive. He makes a makeshift headwrap and tourniquet with the shirt fabric and limps off. The two boys spot his gun on the floor of his car and take it for themselves.
Sherrif Bell visits his Uncle Ellis, to whom he's alluded earlier in the novel as also being a Texas sheriff. Ellis tells Bell that Bell's wife Loretta wrote him telling him that Bell plans to resign from his position as sheriff. Bell and Ellis talk about Bell's parents, and they talk about how Bell's Uncle Mac was shot by people who were dissatisfied with his way of running things. Bell asks Ellis about how his life is going. He offers to clean up around the house for him or take him somewhere in his car (Ellis is confined to a wheelchair). Ellis declines the offer. After some pleasantries and catching up, Bell finally skirts the issue he came to discuss. He asks Ellis about his biggest regrets in life, and Ellis immediately understands that this is a confessional conversation.
Bell then tells Ellis what really happened when his troop was pinned down by German soldiers in WWII, the battle that earned him his Bronze Star. A mortar hit the building where they were stationed. Most of the troop was buried in rubble, but Bell couldn't confirm if any of his men were still alive. He mounted a gun and fired into the trees at the Germans, waiting for night to fall. But when night finally fell, he didn't hold his position. Instead, he ran away. When the major told him that he was being awarded a Bronze Star, Bell told him he didn't want it. Then he told the major what actually happened the night of the ambush. The major simply told him to accept the medal and never repeat that story to anyone, or he would find him and make him "wish [he] was in hell with [his] back broke" (276). Ellis tells Bell that he thinks his increased guilt is a sign of age, and that he shouldn't be so hard on himself. He tells him that he should tell his wife Loretta, and he expects that she'll be much less disappointed than Bell is in himself.
Bell recaps his meeting with Ellis from his own perspective. He reflects on why it took him so long to feel the need to confess his actions in Germany. He examines himself and determines that in more than three decades, he really hasn't changed all that much. He ran away from danger in WWII, and he's running away now, considering retiring from the police force in the face of Anton Chigurh's murder spree. Bell receives a call at home from Detective Cook with the Odessa police concerning Anton Chigurh. They believe that Anton was involved in a car accident immediately after he murdered Carla Jean Moss. Bell drives to Odessa the very next morning to speak with one of the young men who was at the scene of Chigurh's accident.
He meets the boy in a diner. At first, the boy insists that he doesn't remember what Chigurh looked like and that he was there at the scene by himself. Bell tells him that Chigurh had just finished murdering Carla Jean when he had the accident, and that he'd murdered many more people before that. The boy again claims ignorance. Eventually, though, the boy admits that he was there with his friend David, and that Chigurh gave David $100 for his shirt and his discretion. He offers up specifics about what Chigurh looks like and how severe his injuries were. He tells Bell that he is truly sorry for being involved and that he regrets taking the gun from the scene, but that he thinks he learned something from the whole experience (though he fails to say what it is he learned).
Bell finds Llewelyn Moss's father and pays him a visit to tell him what happened to his son. Mr. Moss is a quiet man; he doesn't react especially emotionally. He talks about Llewelyn's service record in Vietnam, that he was an extremely skilled sniper. Then Bell and Mr. Moss discuss WWII and the difference between their war and their sons' war. Mr. Moss discusses the effect of public opinion and morale on Vietnam soldiers and how the general culture of the '60s and '70s may have contributed to the difficulty of adjusting to post-war life and processing the atrocities they witnessed in battle. He says, "you cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes. I surely dont" (294).
When Bell leaves Moss's house, he continues to think about what he and the man discussed and how unrecognizable youth culture must be for the Texans of merely two generations ago. He then goes to Ozono to visit the Mexican man being charged and sentenced to death for the killing of his deputy, who Bell knows is innocent of this particular murder. Bell knows that Chigurh killed his deputy. He testifies in favor of the man being falsely accused, but it does no good. Bell visits the man prior to his execution to extend his support and offer condolences, but the man laughs at him. He defiantly confesses to the crimes he didn't commit and insults Sheriff Bell. On his way out of the complex, Bell runs into the county prosecutor, and they have a brief exchange about the justice system and the difference between following the law and following what's right and wrong.
When Bell returns home, he finds Loretta's car in the driveway, but not Loretta. He sees that her horse isn't in the stable, so he takes his horse out and rides to look for her. He finds her on horseback, peacefully riding along a dirt path in the sunset. At first she's very upset that he's retiring from the position of sheriff, but she's beginning to accept it and accept the notion of all the change that will follow. They'll have to move, he'll have to find some other form of work. Loretta and Bell ride together and comfort each other with positive thoughts about the near future.
The novel ends as it begins, with a first-person account from Sheriff Bell. He concludes by talking about his father, who was a horse trader. He regrets not thinking more about his father and feels he hasn't done him justice in his remembrance in this volume, but the truth of the matter is that he doesn't cross his mind very much. He recalls two dreams that he's had about his father since his passing. The first is a vague recollection and involves him accepting some money from his father and then losing it shortly thereafter. In the second dream, Bell's father passes him on horseback holding a smoldering ember in a horn with which he can make a fire somewhere in the woods. Bell follows after him, following the light of the horn, but as he is about to catch up and experience the warmth he expects from his father's fire, he wakes up from the dream.
Analysis
Throughout the novel, Anton Chigurh is mythologized as some kind of master of death, and the more he talks and rhapsodizes about destiny and fate, and as in each chapter he continues to elude death or capture, it becomes easier for the reader to buy into this mythology. As the novel progresses, Chigurh undergoes a change; he becomes more comfortable in his role as arbiter of doom. Nowhere is this newfound sense of comfort more clear than in Chirgurh's confrontation with Carla Jean after her mother's funeral. Before he shoots her, he flips a coin and allows her to call it. After she calls it wrong, Chigurh says, "Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning" (259). His strange, prophetic monologue leads one to ask, to whom was the shape of Carla Jean's path visible? Is Chigurh claiming to have known Carla Jean's fate all along? Or is he referring to the knowledge and judgment of a separate God-like figure?
Earlier in their conversation, Chigurh says to Carla Jean, "Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact" (256). Carla Jean calls him a blasphemer, and perhaps she is right in the sense that Chigurh has come to think of himself as a God figure in a delusion of grandeur, a belief reinforced by the many people who think of him as some kind of unstoppable force. Even the novel, backed by Sheriff Bell's perspective, tentatively regards Chigurh as a mythic creature above the limitations of regular men. Clearly, by the time Chigurh waits for Carla Jean in a dark corner of her bedroom, he buys into this image of himself. When she loses her coin toss, he says, "even though I could have told you how all of this would end I thought it not too much to ask that you have a final glimpse of hope in the world to lift your heart before the shroud drops, the darkness" (259). It is as if Chigurh regards himself as a benevolent God by offering Carla Jean this taste of hope. Chigurh controls life, death, hope, and despair in most of his encounters. It is thus easy for the reader to be lulled into believing that Chigurh is a force of nature.
Then, immediately after Chigurh leaves Carla Jean's house after murdering her, McCarthy demonstrates that Chigurh is as vulnerable and susceptible to random acts as everyone else when he is t-boned at a rural intersection and gravely injured. He manages to slip away before an ambulance and the authorities arrive, but it's unclear whether or not he will be able to survive his injuries. He scampers away like a critically wounded animal and authorities are left wondering if he still poses a threat to the community. It is later revealed that the boys who hit his car were smoking marijuana, and the investigator that consults with Sheriff Bell portrays the boys as hopeless "dopers" who died because they were driving under the influence of marijuana; in this roundabout way, McCarthy shows how the proliferation of narcotics and recreational drugs has finally affected Chigurh in the same oblique way they affected Llewelyn Moss; both men find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
