No country for old men - By Cormac McCarthy Page 0,58
coming from the kitchen and he walked down the hallway with the flashlight in one hand and the shotgun in the other. When he got to the doorway he stopped and listened again. The light came from a bare bulb on the back porch. He went on into the kitchen.
A bare formica and chrome table in the center of the room with a box of cereal standing on it. The shadow of the kitchen window lying on the linoleum floor. He crossed the room and opened the refrigerator and looked in. He put the shotgun in the crook of his arm and took out a can of orange soda and opened it with his forefinger and stood drinking it, listening for anything that might follow the metallic click of the can. He drank and set the half-empty can on the counter and shut the refrigerator door and walked through the diningroom and into the livingroom and sat in an easy chair in the corner and looked out at the street.
After a while he rose and crossed the room and went up the stairs. He stood listening at the head of the stairwell. When he entered the old woman’s room he could smell the sweet musty odor of sickness and he thought for a moment she might even be lying there in the bed. He switched on the flashlight and went into the bathroom. He stood reading the labels of the pharmacy bottles on the vanity. He looked out the window at the street below, the dull winter light from the streetlamps. Two in the morning. Dry. Cold. Silent. He went out and down the hallway to the small bedroom at the rear of the house.
He emptied her bureau drawers out onto the bed and sat sorting through her things, holding up from time to time some item and studying it in the bluish light from the yardlamp. A plastic hairbrush. A cheap fairground bracelet. Weighing these things in his hand like a medium who might thereby divine some fact concerning the owner. He sat turning the pages in a photo album. School friends. Family. A dog. A house not this one. A man who may have been her father. He put two pictures of her in his shirtpocket.
There was a ceiling fan overhead. He got up and pulled the chain and lay down on the bed with the shotgun alongside him, watching the wooden blades wheel slowly in the light from the window. After a while he got up and took the chair from the desk in the corner and tilted it and pushed the top backladder up under the doorknob. Then he sat on the bed and pulled off his boots and stretched out and went to sleep.
In the morning he walked through the house again upstairs and down and then returned to the bathroom at the end of the hall to shower. He left the curtain pulled back, the water spraying onto the floor. The hallway door open and the shotgun lying on the vanity a foot away.
He dried the dressing on his leg with a hairdryer and shaved and dressed and went down to the kitchen and ate a bowl of cereal and milk, walking through the house as he ate. In the livingroom he stopped and looked at the mail lying in the floor beneath the brass slot in the front door. He stood there, chewing slowly. Then he set bowl and spoon on the coffeetable and crossed the room and bent over and picked up the mail and stood sorting through it. He sat in a chair by the door and opened the phone bill and cupped the envelope and blew into it.
He glanced down the list of calls. Halfway down was the Terrell County Sheriff’s Department. He folded the bill and put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in his shirtpocket. Then he looked through the other pieces of mail again. He rose and went into the kitchen and got the shotgun off the table and came back and stood where he’d stood before. He crossed to a cheap mahogany desk and opened the top drawer. The drawer was stuffed with mail. He laid the shotgun down and sat in the chair and pulled the mail out and piled it on the desk and began to go through it.
Moss spent the day in a cheap motel on the edge of town sleeping naked in the bed with his new clothes on