Summary
Chigurh finds the man who hired Carson Wells to kill him and recover the case. He finds him in his office, in a tall glass building in the middle of a small city, and he shoots him in the throat with small-caliber birdshot from his shotgun which causes the man to suffer and suffocate on his own blood, rather than the quick death that would result from high-caliber rounds. As the man is dying on the floor, Chigurh explains that he used the birdshot because he didn't want to break the window and "rain glass on people in the street" (200).
The narrative then shuttles to Carla Jean's perspective, showing her board a Greyhound bus with her grandmother en route to El Paso, Texas. Carla Jean's grandmother has cancer and is extremely upset by the fact that she's being uprooted from her home because of something Llewelyn did, and what makes it worse is that they don't even know what Llewelyn did. Meanwhile at Carla Jean's grandmother's house from which they just fled, Anton Chigurh arrives. He breaks in with his cattlegun and stalks around the house. Finding no one home, he goes through their mail, takes a shower, and then goes to sleep in one of the beds.
Llewelyn Moss leaves the hospital and spends a day in a motel. He showers, shaves, and redresses his wound. Then he hires a cab to take him to the spot on the border where he hid the case of cash. He pays the cab driver a thousand dollars to take him to the spot on the border and then to San Antonio, Texas. Once in San Antonio, Llewelyn checks into a motel on highway 90 and buys a Tec-9 semi-automatic pistol from an ad in the newspaper. He also buys a 1978 Ford pickup truck with good torque and a powerful engine. In Boerne he picks up a teenage girl hitchhiking on the interstate, and once he determines she's trustworthy, he asks her to drive a little while so he can get some sleep. He tells her not to speed, because if they're pulled over, it would not end well for either of them.
When Sheriff Bell arrives home, his wife gives him a message from Carla Jean. She called his house from West Texas and left a number, asking him to call her back. When he calls her, she asks him if his word is good, and he assures her that it is. She then proposes to tell him where Llewelyn called her from the day before, after he assures her that no harm will come to Llewelyn from him or his deputies.
Llewelyn and the hitchhiking girl continue down the road. They stop at a roadside diner for a meal and Llewelyn gives her a thousand dollars to help get her to California. He advises against hitchhiking, telling her that she can only be lucky so many times before she runs into real danger. They stop at a motel and she tries to convince him to sleep with her, but he refuses and gets her her own room. They share a few beers and talk about life and reinventing themselves. She tries to understand why Llewelyn is hiding from the law, but he keeps his situation mostly to himself. He tells her he's driving to El Paso, and when they get there, he's taking her to a bus station.
Sheriff Bell makes it up to the town where Moss and the hitchhiker girl are staying. He isn't sure what he's looking for, but he finds it anyways; he drives up to a motel with several squad cars flashing their lights in the parking lot. When Bell pulls up, he finds another sheriff there with whom he's acquainted. The Sheriff fills him in on what's happened. There was a shootout earlier; two people died and the third, the original assailant, was flown out to a hospital. The Sheriff accompanies Bell to the clinic where he identifies the body of Llewelyn Moss and the young girl with whom he was traveling. Bell then decides to drive west towards El Paso, presumably to tell Carla Jean about Llewelyn in person, but at the last minute he decides to return to the scene of the crime.
The perspective shuttles to Anton Chigurh, who shows up to the motel where Llewelyn was killed and breaks into the room opposite where he was staying. Chigurh fishes the briefcase full of cash out of the air vent when he sees Sheriff Bell's cruiser pull into the parking lot. Sheriff Bell goes to the room where Llewelyn was staying and finds no one there. He walks back to his cruiser and drives a few blocks up the road and radios for backup. He believes that Chigurh is still waiting inside the motel, but by the time backup arrives, it seems that he must have slipped away while Bell was investigating Llewelyn's room. Bell makes the drive to El Paso the next morning and tells Carla Jean that Llewelyn has died.
Analysis
McCarthy further develops the theme of the disillusionment of the 1960s and beyond with Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's introduction to Part VII. First, Bell reveals that when he fought in WWII, his entire unit was killed except for him. He says, "They died and I got a medal. I dont even need to know what you think about that" (195). His self-deprecating tone suggests that he lives with survivor's guilt, which is a symptom of PTSD. Bell repeatedly protests that he doesn't deserve the good fortune in his life, especially as it relates to his wife, who he believes is in every way a better person than he is.
Bell then refers to the attitudes of some of the men returning from war and attending universities on the G.I. Bill:
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. (195)
Bell refers to the hardships that settlers faced during the westward expansion of the United States. The sheriff's politics are mostly unclear throughout the novel; though he tends to lean in a conservative direction and Christian values seem to inform his worldview, he demonstrates his preference to take things on a case-by-case basis and not make decisions based upon his preconceived notions. However, in this particular chapter intro, the sheriff reveals his views more explicitly by referring to the "scalping and gutting" of settlers without providing a counterpoint to acknowledge the violence against the indigenous population to which he's alluding as the perpetrators of violence.
Of course, the domestic politics of returning home from war would only intensify in the '60s and '70s with the Vietnam War. There's irony in the sheriff's words in the sense that he's trying to remain fair and sympathetic to the perspective of colonists while pushing back on the way that war and education seems to make some young men, in his experience, less conservative. But perhaps these young men push back on their places of origin in recognition of the tyranny and trauma of war, the way some soldiers returned from Vietnam entirely drained of their faith in the United States government.
Bell recalls a questionnaire sent out to public schools in the 1930s asking teachers to describe the biggest problems they face in the course of teaching students. He recalls, "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" (195-196). He then contrasts those answers to the answers teachers gave forty years later. "Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide" (196). He uses this as anecdotal evidence that the world is "goin to hell in a handbasket" (196).
He then refers to a conference he attended in Corpus Christi with his wife, where he sat next to a woman who said to him, "I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion" to which he responds, "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" and says that his comment "pretty much ended the conversation" (196-197). It's difficult to say whether Bell takes more issue with the woman's stance on abortion or her manner of communicating it, which emphasizes the equivocating nature of his narrative voice. His rhetoric, nonetheless, equates abortion with euthanasia.
In his introduction to the following chapters, Bell says, "I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics" (218). Although Bell isn't the voice of the novel, and in fact by separating his narrative voice from the third-person narration of the main narrative, McCarthy emphasizes a certain distance from his perspective, Bell's statement regarding narcotics begs the question of the whole novel. The very existence of cartels represents the behemoth enterprise of narcotics, which in turn responds to the massive demand for them (because without that demand, there would be no need for such a huge supply). However, the nature of narcotics is that they reinforce their own demand through their addictive properties.
Moss would never have encountered that case of money if narcotics didn't exist. So, the novel presents the downfall of people who aren't even involved in drugs in any way; neither Moss nor Carla Jean use or sell drugs. But by virtue of their existence, they've been caught in the crossfire of drug-related violence. After Bell makes his comment on narcotics being the perfect invention of Satan, he says, "I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin and they asked me if I believed in Satan. I said Well that aint the point. And they said I know but do you? I had to think about that. I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief I reckon had waned somewhat. Now I’m startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation. Or not to me they dont" (218). This passage demonstrates that despite the fact that Christian doctrine seems to inform much of the Sheriff's worldview, he himself isn't necessarily a by-the-book believer; however, the way he presents his crisis or loss of faith over time suggests that his line of work combined with the general milieu of the mid-twentieth century might have drained him of it.
