////Closed thread: Shopping for Supplies

As Gunnar pushed open the door of the shop, his eyes remained on the sign that hung overhead. “Overton” was painted in green script consisting of lazy loops across the weathered plank that waver lightly in the wind. The paint was chipped and the wood cracked—hints at the age of the sign. When the door swung open a few more inches, a soft bell chimed above Gunnar to announce his entrance. The sound distracted the ex-ranch hand and attracted his gaze as he continued to step forward, hand still perched on the wrought iron door handle. Thunk! The door bumped into something solid when it was almost at a right angle to the wall. The sudden stop jarred Gunnar and he jerked his hand back as if he’d touched the glowing red end of a branding iron. Stepping to the side, he let the door swing shut on its hinges and reveal what it had collided with. A crate? His bushy eyebrows lifted as he eyed the container. It came almost up to his chest and was just as wide and deep. Who puts something like that right behind the door? He asked himself as he swung his gaze across the room and got his answer. The same kind of person who leaves stuff like it everywhere, anywhere. There was a clear path, at least compared to the rest of the cluttered floor, to a counter with an old-timey register on the other side of the room.

“Not like I can go anywhere else,” he muttered and walked forward. The floorboards creaked beneath the thick soles of his work boots with each step he took. Gunnar glanced to either side as he walked and realized that every couple of steps revealed new winding paths branching from the one he walked. Shelving units and barrels and crates, some open and some still nailed shut, created the aisles in the store. The disorder of the merchandise that made up the short walls dividing the shop’s floor space sent a chill up Gunnar’s spine. Steeling himself, he continued onward until he arrived at the counter. “Great… no one’s here,” he grumbled Gunnar as he looked around that small open area. He spied a door behind the counter with a notice posted beside it: “RING BELL FOR SERVICE”. Another bell? thought Gunnar as he searched the counter. The small bell was easy enough to find as it set beside the register. Reaching forward, Gunnar tapped it, depressing the button at the top. The ding of the bell filled the room. All that was left for Gunnar to do was wait.

A series of thumps steadily growing louder filled the silent shop after the ringing of the bell had died. Just behind the door, the clomping stopped and then the handle wobbled and turned with a metallic rattling. The door pulled inward, revealing an old man. His skin was wrinkled and pocked with age, as if the canvas was trying to depict a harsher time in the man’s life. “Yeah, what can I do for you?” called the man in a thick Irish accent as he hung back at the door for a second. After the brief pause, he continued forward until he was standing directly behind the counter. His steel blue eyes swept over the man in front of him and settled on the holstered guns. “What’re you bringing guns in here for, lad?” he asked, suspicious seeping into the sound of the elder’s voice. “Are you robbing me?”

Knobby, quaking fingers reached under the counter, settling on some hidden object. “I don’t much care for thieves. You one of those Cailsin Hallow’s creeps, too?” he quipped. As he fixed his eyes on the customer, his gray, bushy eyebrows bristled like a cat rubbed the wrong way. “Odd folk up there. I don’t much care for them neither. You one of them?” With his hand still resting on the item concealed under the counter, the shopkeeper spoke again. “Cat got your tongue? Out with it, lad. If you want something, say so or get out of my shop,” demanded the proprietor in a gruff voice.

Gunnar lifted his gaze from the ringing bell to the door, behind which he heard someone approaching. “Afterno—“ began the ex-ranch hand when the man came out of the back room and stepped up to the counter, only to cut him off with twenty questions. Gunnar grew anxious as he waited for an opportunity to speak, especially since he figured the clerk was clutching at a shotgun under the counter.

“Whoa, whoa! Hold yer horses!” Gunnar lifted his hands up into the air, his guns remaining holstered at his sides. For any observer, it’d look like Gunnar was the victim of a hold up and not the clerk. “Don’t mean any trouble! Just ‘ere to buy,” explained the cowpoke, his normally slow drawl gone as he rushed to push the words out of his mouth. Gunnar decided to keep quiet about the fact that he was from the university, since the old man seemed leery of him already. “Just after a hammock if yah got one, otherwise canvas and rope’ll do, along with some sewing supplies.” After requesting the provisions he sought, the younger—for once—man fell silent and waited for the clerk’s reply. Gunnar was too worried about what the man had hidden under the counter to risk irritating him in any way. The last thing he wanted was a shoot out in some quiet Irish town when he was taking shelter at the school just up the road.

"A hammock?!" spat the clerk, eying Gunnar. “Just what do you need a hammock for, lad?” Before he had even gotten an answer, he withdrew his hands from the hidden place beneath the counter, leaving behind whatever it was he had been clutching, and walked towards one end of the counter. Once reaching the barricade, he reached under it, undoing a secret clasp, and lifted the hinged partition. As he swung the panel upward, the antique hinge groaned in protest. At about a forty-five degree angle, the mechanism snagged. The old man pulled his hand away and the plank remained in the air. With a wordless grumble, the man reached under the counter again and retrieved a can of WD40. After several failed attempts, he managed to thread the tiny red straw into the nozzle using his quaking, gnarled fingers. Taking hold of the floating edge of the partition, he squirted some oil onto the stuck hinge. Once it was lubricated, he gave a hard yank and worked the hinge free. Without a sound, the panel pivoted and he held it upright as he stepped through the gap. He released it and the wood clattered back into its place.

“I think I’ve got a hammock in stock somewhere around here…” he muttered to himself, gesturing for the cowpoke to follow him as he shuffled across the dusty floor. The simple sack cloth pants the man wore whispered softly around his ankles, the cuffs resting atop his worn leather boots. He led Gunnar on a winding through the store. In some places, they left fresh footprints in the layers of dust that had accumulated on the floor, in others, their passage left no trail as no dust was upon the floorboards. The old man traced his aged, quivering fingertips across the shelves and barrels as he passed them, as if touching them was enough to remind him of the objects that they stored. “No… No… Not this… Not here… Where is it,” he mumbled under his breath as they walked.

Suddenly, he stopped. “Oh! That’s right!” he exclaimed. The older man whirled around with surprising speed given his apparent feebleness. If the other man had been following closely, or at all, the clerk nearly collided with him and yelled, “What are you standing so close for, sonny! Give a man some room!”

It wasn’t until well after the older man had pulled his hands free of the cubby set in the counter and left behind whatever confident-booster he had stowed inside it. While the man fused with the stuck hinge, Gunnar dropped his hands back to his sides, though he was careful to keep them away from the familiar perches of his holstered revolvers. His hands hung awkwardly beside him as he watched the even more awkward scene unfold at the end of the counter. A small smirk tugged at the corners of his lips as the man finally finished and stepped into the shop proper. Gunnar opened his mouth to speak, but the loud crack of wood on wood interrupted him, and he jerked with a start. By the time he recovered, the man had already launched into the search for a hammock.

Gunnar followed the man, heavy boots thudding across the floor. When they crossed over less traveled areas, his footprints remained imprinted on the dusty wood to mark his passing as clearly as if he was walking along a shore of silt and sand. He kept his silence, figuring it was best to leave the peculiar old man to his thoughts than to disturb him anymore than nature had already done. Before he knew it though, the man had whipped around and almost run right into him. “Yeah, sure thing,” answered Gunnar in an almost meek voice as he pressed his back against a shelving unit. The objects on the shelves teetered, threatening to topple from their places. He quickly turned around and grabbed the nearest shelf to stabilize it. “Hey, there’s one over ‘ere,” he called out, looking down at the lowest shelf. Once the contents of the shelving unit had stopped wobbling, he reached down and hoisted up the rolled up hammock. “Looks good enough for me,” he stated after giving it a quick examination. “How much for it?”

The old man continued on, and by the time he realized that the cowboy wasn’t with him, he was at the end of the aisle. Squinting his eyes, the wrinkles of his face creasing into deeper canyons on his face, Seamus looked at what the other man had retrieved from the teetering shelves. “That old thing?” He shuffled back to Gunnar and reached out to try to take the object from him. If he failed at the first attempt, he would just try snatching it again until it was in his grasp, demanding, “Give it here, already.” Once he had it, he unfurled the canvas and inspected it. “It’s in good shape… No holes, ropes seem to be fine,” accessed the shopkeeper before he nodded his head and offered it back to the cowboy.

“Fifteen Euros, no less,” he stated, extending his other hand. If the cowboy was to look around, he would realize he was backed into a dead end aisle and the only way out was through the clerk.

When Seam’s gnarled hands reached towards the rolled-up hammock in Gunnar’s hands, he lifted it up as he stepped back, pulling it from the range of the man’s eager fingers. “Hold yer horses!” grumbled Gunnar before he relented and gave the bundle of cloth and cord to the older man to appraise it. The ex-ranch hand cocked an eyebrow, waiting for the other man to finish with the hammock. Gunnar took the hammock back, rolling it up and tucking it under one arm. “Guess it’s ah good thing I got my money exchanged,” he said as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. A few seconds later, he was counting out the bills: three five Euro banknotes. Spreading the three pieces of printed paper into a fan between his fingers, he took a moment to examine the currency. He hadn’t really taken the time to look at it before, and the money seemed strange to him. Each denomination was printed in a different color on a different sized paper. It was so much more sophisticated than the American dollar and, sadly, worth more.

“Here yah go.” Gunnar handed the three banknotes to the clerk. “Thank yah kindly, sir. Have a good day.” If the man didn’t continue to block him, the ex-ranch hand left the store. He had what he’d come for and he knew just where he wanted to set it up.
[Exits unless stopped].

Seamus took the offered Euros and quickly tucked them into his pocket. "Welcome, lad," he said, glancing the younger man. "Now if you don't need anything else, you can show yourself out." The shop owner preceeded Gunnar out of the aisle to the counter. The hinged partition creased as he lifted, thunked into place after he let it drop, and he went over to the cash register. It dinged as he opened it and slid the three banknotes into the same slot. "One less thing on the shelves," he commented as he snapped the drawer shut with a metallic clank. The floorboards creaked beneath Seamus's shuffling feet as he returned to the door leading to the back room. He opened, walked through, and pulled it shut behind him. Another day, another sale.
[Exits]