The Laughing Gorilla by Robert Graysmith

Author:Robert Graysmith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

AFTER school on Monday, September 23, Jimmy Wagner and Peter Kostura went to play on one of the raw hillocks overseeing the timeless furrow of the Kingsbury Run. A run is a midland creek that sometimes rushes with powerful currents and at other times is dry. Breathless, sixteen-year-old Jimmy and twelve-year-old Peter came out on the shapeless heap of Jackass Hill on Cleveland’s East Side.

On the eroding summit at the end of East Forty-ninth Street, a few houses were cloistered among a thicket of white and black willows. The fruit of the white willows had been yellowish and drooping in June. By the end of June, the black willows had gone to seed. By July, both kinds were spotted green and white, August heat made their berries swell, and by September they were drooping in dense blue clusters. The big sassafras tree retained its red, club-shaped pedicels, but its empty fruit cups were trilling in the wind.

Straggly sunflowers poked through tin cans by a rusting bedspring where the boys spent a while jumping up and down. Downy shad bushes, brown-headed wool grass, and seedy spikes of sawgrass—itchy stuff—caught at their trousers. The boys flew kites in the sweeping winds and peered down into the isolated run at a spot where the Erie Gully and wider run met. The wind was raising dust clouds along the flat-bottomed gully—the arid bed of a creek. Sections of cliff sheathed away onto vacant tin-roofed buildings, corrugated iron sheds, a refinery lime house, and the Erie Railroad shops below. Two switch engines were working the yards as strings of freight and passenger cars on sidings about the broad arroyo shook in the wind.

Two Rapid Transit System trains crossed the basin at an angle, linking the economically depressed downtown to the swank suburbs of Shaker Heights. They brought every manner of man to the gully from every manner of place for every manner of reason. Thirty pairs of sooty tracks filled the run for most of its length. Beyond Forty-ninth Street the tracks split, and the Erie line diverted into a little gully of its own as the Shaker, Rapid, and Nickel Plate Railroad lines continued. As the canyon swung southeast from the industrial area out to East Ninetieth Street, its rushing waters were diverted into subterranean sewers. At the Thirty-seventh Street Bridge these sewers emerged to create a stagnant pool that flowed into the Cuyahoga River. From the southern shore of Lake Erie, the valley formed by the excessively polluted Cuyahoga (the only U.S. river to ever catch fire) cleaves the city into an east and west side. Toward Lake Erie, the gully became a canyon lit along its bluffs at night by vats of molten slag and the sulfur-belching stacks of steel mills. It was hell.

When Jimmy and Peter’s softball rolled over the steep sixty-foot slope, they started after it, pushing their way through tangled underbrush. Halfway down Jimmy broke free into an open sedge hollow and crawled down into a shallow indentation. “Peter, there’s a man down there,” he shouted.

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