No country for old men - By Cormac McCarthy Page 0,46

the engine and then sat watching the building in the rearview mirror. As if he might be thinking of something else he needed, but that wasnt it. He put his fingers inside the cuff of his shirt and carefully blotted the sweat from his eyes. Then he put the vehicle in gear and backed out of the parking space and pulled out onto the highway headed toward town.

He drove down Main Street and turned north on Getty and east again on Nopal where he parked and shut off the engine. His leg was still bleeding. He got the scissors from the bag and the tape and he cut a three inch round disc out of the cardboard box that held the cotton. He put that together with the tape into his shirtpocket. He took a coathanger from the floor behind the seat and twisted the ends off and straightened it out. Then he leaned and opened his bag and took out a shirt and cut off one sleeve with the scissors and folded it and put it in his pocket and put the scissors back in the paper bag from the Cooperative and opened the door and eased himself down, lifting his injured leg out with both hands under his knee. He stood there, holding on to the door. Then he bent over with his head to his chest and stood that way for the better part of a minute. Then he raised up and shut the door and started down the street.

Outside the drugstore on Main he stopped and turned and leaned against a car parked there. He checked the street. No one coming. He unscrewed the gascap at his elbow and hooked the shirtsleeve over the coathanger and ran it down into the tank and drew it out again. He taped the cardboard over the open gastank and balled the sleeve wet with gasoline over the top of it and taped it down and lit it and turned and limped into the drugstore. He was little more than half way down the aisle toward the pharmacy when the car outside exploded into flame taking out most of the glass in front of the store.

He let himself in through the little gate and went down the pharmacist’s aisles. He found a packet of syringes and a bottle of Hydrocodone tablets and he came back up the aisle looking for penicillin. He couldnt find it but he found tetracycline and sulfa. He stuffed these things in his pocket and came out from behind the counter in the orange glow of the fire and went down the aisle and picked up a pair of aluminum crutches and pushed open the rear door and went hobbling out across the gravel parking lot behind the store. The alarm at the rear door went off but no one paid any attention and Chigurh never had even glanced toward the front of the store which was now in flames.

He pulled into a motel outside of Hondo and got a room at the end of the building and walked in and set his bag on the bed. He shoved the pistol under the pillow and went in the bathroom with the bag from the Cooperative and dumped the contents out into the sink. He emptied his pockets and laid out everything on the counter—keys, billfold, the vials of antibiotic and the syringes. He sat on the edge of the tub and pulled off his boots and reached down and put the plug in the tub and turned on the tap. Then he undressed and eased himself into the tub while it filled.

His leg was black and blue and swollen badly. It looked like a snakebite. He laved water over the wounds with a washcloth. He turned his leg in the water and studied the exit wound. Small pieces of cloth stuck to the tissue. The hole was big enough to put your thumb in.

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 dropped his boots in the water and patted himself dry with the towel and sat on the toilet and took the bottle of Betadine and the packet of swabs from the sink. He tore open the packet with his teeth and unscrewed the bottle and tipped it slowly over the wounds. Then he set the bottle down and bent to work, picking out the