No Country for Old Men

1

The Snow is falling in a gusting wind in West Texas, The sun is rising. bringing us to a full day. None of them show people or human habitation. It was a hard sunbaked prairie.

The flashing light bars of a police car stopped on the shoulder. A young sheriff's deputy is opening the rear door on the far side of the car. Close on a pair of hands manacled behind someone's back. A hand enters to take the prisoner by one arm.

Back to the shot over the light bars: the deputy, with a hand on top of the prisoner's head to help him clear the doorframe, eases the prisoner into the backseat. All we see of the prisoner is his dark hair disappearing into the car. 

The deputy closes the back door. He opens the front-passenger door and reaches down for something heavy at his feet. The deputy swings the heavy object into the front passenger seat. Matching inside the car: it looks like an oxygen tank with a petcock at the top and tubing running off it.

The deputy slams the door. On the door slam cut to a Texas highway racing under the lens, the landscape flat to the horizon. The siren whoops.

Seated in the sheriff's office on the phone. The prisoners stand in the background. The focus is too soft to see his features but his posture shows his arms are still behind his back.

Behind him, the prisoner seat himself on the floor without making a sound and scoot his manacled hands out under his legs. Hands in front of him now, he stands. The prisoner approaches. As he nears the deputy's back he grows sharper but begins to crop out of the top.

As the deputy reaches forward to hang up, the prisoner is raising his hands out of frame just behind him. The manacled hands drop back into the frame in front of the deputy's throat and jerk back and up. Wider: the prisoner's momentum brings both men crashing backward to the floor, face-up, a deputy on top. The deputy reaches up to try to get his hands under the strangling chain. The prisoner brings pressure. His wrists whiten around the manacles.

The deputy's legs writhe and stamp. He moves in a clumsy circle, crabbing around the pivot point of the other man's back arched against the floor. The deputy's flailing legs kick over a wastebasket, send spinning the castored chair, and slam at the desk. Blood creeps around the friction points where the cuffs bite the prisoner's wrists. Blood is being spat on by the deputy. The prisoner feels with his thumb at the deputy's neck and averts his face. A yank of the chain ruptures the carotid artery. It jets blood. The blood hits the office wall, drumming hollowly.

The prisoner walks into the bathroom, runs the water, and puts his wrists, now freed, under it. At the office, Close the air tank. One hand, a towel wrapped at the wrist, reaches in to hoist it.

The road rushes under the lens. Point-of-view through a windshield of taillights ahead, the only pair in sight. A siren bloop. The car pulls over. A four-door Ford sedan. The police car pulls over behind.

The prisoner name is Anton Chigurh gets out of the police car and slings the tank over his shoulder. He walks up the road to the man cranking down his window, groping for his wallet.

"What's this about? " "Step out of the car please, sir." The motorist squints at the man with the strange apparatus. "I need you to step out of the car, sir." The man opens his door and emerges. Chigurh reaches up to the man's forehead with the end of the tube connected to the air tank. "Would you hold still please, sir?"

A hard pneumatic sound. The man flops back against the car. Blood trickles from a hole in the middle of his forehead. Chigurh waits for the body to slide down the car and crumple, clearing the front door. He opens it and hoists the air tank over into the front seat.

__________

Through the arid plains. Seen through the Heat shimmer rises from the desert floor. The horizon discovers a distant herd of antelope. The animals are grazing. Reverse on a man in blue jeans and cowboy boots sitting on his heels, elbows on knees, peering through a pair of binoculars. A heavy-barreled rifle is slung across his back. Llewelyn Moss lowers the binoculars, slowly unsling the rifle, and looks through its sight. The view through the sight swims for a moment to refind the herd. One animal is staring directly at us, it's motion arrested as if it's heard or seen something. Close on Moss's eyes, one at the sight, the other closed. He mutters: "Hold still."