Audio excerpt from Gateway Gas (Chapter 14) by Sylvester Brown, Jr. Warning: Not suitable for children

 

Excerpt from Chapter Fourteen

The Ever-Mysterious Olivia

March 15, 2017

 

"Hey, Sol, look, it's the newspaper man."

Sal yelled to his twin brother as Cliff entered their business, Sol & Sal's Used Tire Shop. The shop has been in the Ville neighborhood on Martin Luther King Drive before there was a MLK Drive. Back when Cliff was a kid the street was named Easton Avenue. The twins had run the business since the early 1960s. Business was always good. A new set of tires for the average sedan could cost up to $1,000. Customers could get a decent set at the used tire shop for $300 or less.

The address given for Olivia was just a few blocks from the brother’s shop. Cliff knew they knew everybody and everything that happened in the neighborhood. Maybe the twins would have information about the prisoner he could use.

Cliff appreciated the metallic tinkle of the rusted bell above the door as he entered. The sound was a throwback to times when elderly black business owners always had a word of advice or an odd job for neighborhood kids like Cliff.

Sol, Sal’s brother came through the dingy burgundy curtains that separated the storefront from the huge, garage-like area where the brothers serviced cars and trucks. “Hey, youngblood, he said, wiping his dirty hands on an even dirtier rag. Sol embraced Cliff. Though in his late 70s, Sol is linebacker strong. Sal, not so much. Cliff took comfort in his embrace. He also liked the fact that no matter how old he was, he’d always be “youngblood” to Sol & Sal.

The twin brothers are total opposites who rarely agree on anything – race, politics crime… not even the origination of the shop's name. Sal said the name was inherited from the previous Jewish owners. Sol told Cliff that his brother was “full of shit.” The shop, he said, was an abbreviation of their first names - Solomon and Salvatore Nester. Sol’s version made more sense. Sal’s story relied on the unbelievable fact that two Jews sold a shop to two black men who happened to share their first names.

"What's on your mind, youngblood?” Sol asked. “You only come around when your cogs are stuck." Sal, laughing, chimed in: “Yeah what problem can we solve for you today, young man?”

Cliff wished he could deny it, but it was true. He was still shaken from his brief but brutal conversation with Olivia. His first impulse was to go back to the Globe and tell Tink, he wasn’t doing the assignment. He’d tell his boss that Olivia was batshit crazy and there was no way he’d get anything useful out of her. After driving around aimlessly, he found himself trolling his old neighborhood.

“You guys heard about that lady who killed that baby?”

The brothers exchanged glances. They were communicating something with their eyes that Cliff didn’t quite understand. Sal looked at his brother as if seeking permission to speak:

“Crazy ass, woman. What kinda mother kills her own baby?”

Sol rolled his eyes at his brother, turned his back and went behind the counter. He pulled out an old hat-sized, tin box with World War II-era stickers pasted on its lid and sides. It once belonged to the twin’s father, a soldier of the war, Sol once told him. Cliff got the impression that Sol was carefully mulling his words before responding to his brother’s comment:

“Stop it Sal, we don’t know the facts, only rumors.”

“Rumors my black ass,” Sal retorted. “They found a dead baby and some crack in the house. Case closed. She’s gonna get the death penalty...unless…”

Again, the weird communication thing.

“Unless? Unless what?” Cliff wondered. It was as if Sal wanted Sol to fill in the unfinished sentence.

Usually Cliff appreciated the brother’s different take on things. Sal has little patience for today’s black people. He rails incessantly about “no-account, do-nothing, lazy ass, welfare and drug addicted niggas,” especially “young niggas with sagging pants and even lower IQ’s and morals,” he’d say.

Sol is an old school, black pride, “everything wrong with blacks is because of racism” kinda guy. Somewhere in between their divergent philosophies, Cliff usually found a balance that guided his thinking and some of his writing.

But not this time. Sol wasn’t playing the usual tit-for-tat game with his brother. He nether indicted or defended Olivia. Cliff stared at Sol as he tinkered with items in his box. 

“What is it, Sol?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” his old friend replied. “I just think folks who don’t know what they’re talking about ought to shut the hell up…Sal!

“I’m jus’ sayin’,” Sal replied unusually noncombative.

“Wait, do you guys know Olivia?” Cliff asked. “If you do, that will be helpful ‘cause I found very little about her in the public records.”

Again, the brothers swapped curious looks. “Well, I think Sol knew…” His brother’s angry glance stalled Sal’s words.   

“You ever seen a Luger up close, Cliff?” Sol asked, pulling a black semi-automatic with a brown base and elongated barrel from the tin box.

Cliff walked closer to Sol’s extending his hand. “Can’t say that I have,” he answered, cradling the gun. Cliff imagined the twin’s father fighting the German’s in the trenches of WWII. His respect for them deepened as he realized that they, too, were soldiers but in the Korean War in the 1950s. The fact that they and their father fought for “freedoms” overseas that they were denied in their own country, humbled him.

What snapped Cliff out of his mental revelry was the realization that his old friend had side stepped his question.

“What were you about to say, Sal?” 

Sol answered before his brother could. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to help you on this one, youngblood.” He retrieved the gun, put it back in its tin, closed the lid, turned his back, slid the burgundy curtain aside and returned to the back of his shop.

Sal just shrugged his shoulders. “I guess we ain’t got nothing to say.”

The bell tingled again as Cliff exited the tire shop. He looked up and down the street of his old stomping grounds. Cliff instinctively felt the Nester Brothers knew more about Olivia than they were letting on. but were refusing to talk for odd some reason.

He fired up the Lexus’ engine. As he peered in the rearview mirror before whipping a U-turn to head downtown, back to the Globe, he vowed that he would learn more about the mysterious, troubling Olivia Johnson.

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