Summary
Bell visits Carla Jean in Odessa where she's staying with her grandmother indefinitely, until she hears otherwise from Llewelyn. When Bell knocks on the door, Carla Jean immediately expects tragedy, but Bell quickly assures her that as far as he knows, Llewelyn is still alive and on the run. Carla Jean insists that they move their conversation to a nearby cafe to avoid scaring her grandmother. Once they're at the cafe, the Sheriff tries to impress upon Carla Jean the danger Llewelyn faces and the seriousness of the people whose money he has. Carla Jean maintains that she knows nothing about it and that she's just waiting to hear from him.
She then tells Bell the story of how she met Llewelyn. After she left high school she went to work at Walmart to contribute to her family's expenses, and every day she hoped that she'd meet her great love. On the ninety-ninth day, Llewelyn showed up asking her the way to the sporting goods section. He asked her on a date, and they were married before the year's end. Bell assures Carla Jean that he understands what Llewelyn means to her, and that his wife is the single most important person in his life. He asks her to trust him, and says he'll do everything in his power to bring Llewelyn to safety, but he has to turn in the money; then, maybe the people after him will leave him alone.
The perspective shuttles to a new character by the name of Wells. Wells is an investigator and contract killer working for the cartel to recover the money that Llewelyn took from the site of the drug-deal-gone-wrong. His employer wants Chigurh taken down, because the more people he kills, the more press coverage the situation receives, and the cartels prefer to avoid press as much as possible. Wells checks into the same motel where Moss and Chigurh had a shootout days prior. He investigates the boarded-up rooms and the surrounding buildings and finds an elderly woman dead in her home from a stray bullet.
Wells then finds Moss in a Mexican hospital recovering from bullet wounds he received in the shootout with Chigurh outside the motel. Wells tries to convince Moss to work with him. He warns Moss of how extremely dangerous Chigurh is and how he has an almost mythological reputation. Some people believe that he can't be killed; Llewelyn doesn't believe it. Wells then suggests that perhaps Chigurh is on his way to Odessa to find Llewelyn's wife. The fact that Wells knows his wife's whereabouts is extremely sobering to Llewelyn, but he betrays no concern to Wells. Wells leaves Llewelyn his card and urges him to call.
Meanwhile, Chigurh handles his own wounds without professional medical attention. He drives to a veterinary supply store and buys forceps, gauze, and antiseptic supplies. He then drives to a pharmacy, blows up a car in front of the store, and in the midst of the chaos and commotion, slips behind the counter and steals hypodermic needles and various prescription antibiotics. He then checks into a motel for five days, during which time he cuts the cloth out of his wounds, cuts away dead tissue, and prevents infection. On the fifth evening, a few deputies drop into the motel. He notices them at the dinner cafe, packs his bags, and hits the road again.
Wells scouts the borderlands where Moss might've left the suitcase, casing out the land and taking pictures of tracks. He determines that Moss hasn't abandoned the money in Mexico, and that it is probably hidden somewhere on the Texas side of the border. While Wells scouts, Sheriff Bell continues to monitor the situation from Texas. Carla Jean still has not contacted him. As Bell leaves the station and heads out to Eagle Pass, he passes the truck carrying the load of all the bodies from the massacre. Bell scolds the driver for the load being improperly secured.
Chigurh continues to rove around the Texas interstate. His transponder beeps near the intersection of I-481 and 57. The transponder leads him to a roadside motel. He checks into a room and takes a nap. Later that night he asks the front desk to see the register of everyone checked into the motel. He then finds the transponder in the bedside table of a room near his own. He waits in the lobby for a few hours until Carson Wells returns. He follows Wells up a stairwell before finally revealing himself. Then, held at gunpoint, Wells walks Chigurh to his room where they sit and discuss the state of affairs regarding the case of money. Wells understands that he likely won't survive this encounter with Chigurh, but he nonetheless tries bargaining for his life. Chigurh then uncharacteristically monologues about the personal changes he's experienced since being injured. He tells Wells about an encounter he had with some strangers at a bar during which he ended up killing a man in front of his friends. This encounter is what ultimately led to him being arrested by Sheriff Bell's deputy, the same deputy he strangled with the chain of his handcuffs. Wells tries to convince Chigurh that he knows where the money is being hidden, but Chigurh doesn't care. He says he knows "something better," that he knows "where [the money is] going to be" (175-176). After a brief and hostile exchange, Chigurh shoots Wells in the face with his shotgun.
Moss remains in the hospital in Mexico rehabilitating and undergoing physical therapy. He calls Carla Jean in Odessa and she is beside herself with anger and sadness. She feels abandoned by him and scared that he's going to die or that she and her grandmother are in danger. Moss tells her to leave the house in Odessa and that he thinks her grandmother won't be bothered there. This makes Carla Jean even angrier, but she has no choice but to comply. Moss tells her that he met someone who can help them, referring to Carson Wells. When Moss hangs up with Carla Jean, he calls Wells, but Chigurh picks up the phone. Chigurh assures Moss that Wells cannot help him anymore. He tells Moss that he knows which hospital he is in, and that he's not going to the hospital. Instead, he's heading to Odessa to kill Carla Jean. Chigurh offers Moss a deal; if he gives himself up with the money, then he promises to spare Carla Jean. Moss tells him instead that he's going to find him and kill him before he can reach Carla Jean.
Analysis
Over the course of the novel, Sheriff Bell's short, first-person introductions to each chapter take on the role of directing the readers' attention to certain overarching themes that might otherwise go unnoticed in the action-packed margins of the main narrative. With Bell's perspective, No Country for Old Men adds a literary dimension to what is otherwise primarily a thriller, a departure from McCarthy's previous work. In these chapters, Bell introduces the theme of "coming-of-age," specifically how the transition from childhood to adulthood has changed since the early 20th century. The novel takes place in the 1980s, and the 1960s, when Bell was growing up, were a period of extreme disillusionment in America and abroad; the sense of goodwill and community to which Bell refers regarding the policing of rural Texas communities is all but a thing of the past. Bell's age and occupation place him in a unique position to comment on American cultural changes from the '40s to the '80s, because he's been a sheriff through it all since he was twenty-five years old. He comments:
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. (158)
Bell expresses retroactive astonishment at how very young he was when he accepted the responsibility of presiding over his county. And he not only demonstrates that young people accepted these positions of authority, he shows that they were more than capable of rising to the task. People young and old "blubbered" when his young preacher friend moved on to a different congregation. Bell contrasts their capability and confidence to the contemporary youth, who he suspects simply don't need to grow up as quickly as he and his cohort.
However, the sheriff's theory is challenged by the more recent war—the war in Vietnam. Both Moss and Wells fought in the Vietnam War, and Moss's wife Carla Jean married Moss at the age of nineteen, just a year older than Bell and his wife were when they married. When Bell meets with Carla Jean in Odessa, he asks her her age and she suspects that Bell would take the information and use it to call her immature, so she says, "I’ll tell you somethin, Sheriff. Nineteen 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" (133). The sheriff offers his personal perspective. "My wife was eighteen when we married. Just had turned. Marryin her makes up for ever dumb thing I ever done. I even think I still got a few left in the account. I think I’m way in the black on that" (133).
In this moment the sheriff sees that his experience and the experience of Carla Jean are seperated only by circumstance. Llewelyn and Carla Jean live simple, "common" lives. They don't need much money to sustain the way they live. But when Llewelyn finds that case of cash, he figures that with it, he can offer Carla Jean a more comfortable life; he could finally give her nice things, even though she doesn't expect them or even want them. In fact, she wishes that he never laid eyes on that case. But ultimately, Llewelyn is driven by the same desire that Bell has to give his wife the best life she can have. The "moral decay" that the Sheriff references exists on a macro scale. The only reason that the case full of cash exists is because the cartel put it there. Llewelyn isn't involved in "doperunning," he's simply a casuality; instead of a stray bullet, he encounters 2.4 million dollars that puts him in just as much danger.
