does the freedom do? Or, as Chigurh, the killer, puts it, “If the rule you used brought you here, what use was the rule?” (McCarthy 175). The Killer When readers of No Country for Old Men first meet Anton Chigurh, he is sitting in a deputy’s office somewhere in Texas, handcuffed and silent. Within a few sentences, Chigurh has used the cuffs to strangle a deputy to death, disguised himself in the deceased cop’s uniform, and driven off in his patrol car (7). By the time Terrell County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell gets a call about an abandoned cop car on the side of the interstate, Chigurh has already killed another man, taken his car, and fled. The police are none the wiser. “What do we have on the perpetrator?” assistant deputy asks Bell. “We don’t,” he replies (43). For all they don’t know, it is clear to Terrell County law enforcement officers that a major threat is on the loose. A concerted effort to contain and capture Chigurh begins – one that fails over and over again in the course of the novel. A big reason is the sheer grit Chigurh displays. He walks through mafia shootouts as though taking a leisurely stroll (119-122), recovers from hospitalization-worthy shotgun injuries in days (161), and casually walks off a vehicle collision that leaves him with a head injury and, as an onlooker describes it, “a bone stickin out under the skin of his arm he didn’t pay no more attention to it than nothin” (292). Chigurh seems unaffected by things that should stop him. If not physically immune, he has enough mental strength to resist fear and pain that might otherwise interfere with his mission. His relentlessness alone affords him near mythic qualities. He kills without compunction, sometimes for reasons as arbitrary as an incorrectly-called coin toss. He is not subject to ordinary human limitations. He seems more force than man – “the invincible Mr. Chigurh” (140). But the killer’s success is not only of his own making – he benefits from the profound state of infrastructural decay in rural Texas in 1980, just as the crack cocaine epidemic is taking hold. The law enforcement that is charged with stopping Chigurh is demoralized and ill-equipped despite the War on Drugs, initially waged by the Nixon administration and popularly re-energized by the successful candidacy of Ronald Reagan. Both administrations echoed rugged individualist notions that, in effect, create conditions for the killer’s success rather than his apprehension. Launched in 1971, Nixon’s War on Drugs looked to combat drug abuse by increasing federal law enforcement operations against it. He was disinterested in the idea that the growing epidemic was suggestive of broader “societal ills.” Three months prior, the Report of the White House Conference for Children and Youth, acknowledged that drug abuse might be a symptom of the “individual inability to cope with […] personal environment[s],” but insisted that the youth’s “increased alienation” was because “society has permitted the perpetuation of the Indochina War, of institutional and personal racism, 102
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