The Last Good Summer at Wonderland Park

By Quari Editions

A heist, a heat wave, and everything owed

It's the summer of 1987 at Wonderland Park, a third-tier Ohio amusement park with a crumbling roller coaster, a haunted-house ride that smells like mildew and regret, and an owner, Dale Pruitt, who has been skimming wages, shorting maintenance budgets, and selling the place to a developer the moment the season ends — a fact he has neglected to mention to the forty-odd employees who believe they still have jobs in the fall. When Donna Szczepanski, the Tilt-A-Whirl operator who has worked every summer since she was sixteen, discovers a locked cashbox in Pruitt's trailer and does the math on what they're all owed, she recruits three other ride operators — her ex-boyfriend Ricky, the teenage Ferris wheel kid known as Moose, and the park's oldest living employee, a sixty-one-year-old man called Fergie who operates the antique carousel and has been stealing small things from the park for thirty years out of habit — to take back what's been taken from them. The heist is small, the window is narrow, and the plan is held together mostly by Donna's stubbornness. Every single thing goes wrong in a different way than expected.

The ride had been running since noon and Donna could feel the slight drag in car number three by two o'clock, the way you feel a pulled thread before you see it. She kept the gate timing, logged the weight distributions without writing them down, watched the cars find their spin the way they always did — not random, never random, just physics operating on geometry in a sequence too fast for the riders to read. They always thought it was random. That was the point. Pruitt's trailer sat forty feet behind the operator booth, close enough that in July heat with the window AC unit cycling off, you could hear through the aluminum wall if the voice inside was carrying. His was. She caught the word 'closing' first, then 'September' in a register that meant a date already agreed on, not a question. Then 'assessed value' and a laugh she had heard him use exactly once before, the night he told the maintenance crew that the Comet's repair estimate was being 'reviewed,' and three weeks later the sign went up. Car number three drifted through its rotation. The family in it — father, two girls, one of the girls with a paper Wonderland crown already going soft in the humidity — screamed in the way that meant they were fine, they were good, they would tell someone about this later. Donna logged the drag. Kept the gate. Heard 'end of season' and 'transition' and then nothing useful for thirty seconds while the AC kicked back on. She had been here twelve summers. She knew the sound a thing made when something was wrong. This was that sound. By the time the family climbed out — the crowned girl listing slightly, still laughing — Donna had done enough of the math to feel sick, and enough more to feel something colder than sick, which was the part where the number stopped being an abstraction and started having forty names attached to it, and one of those names was hers, and she had been running this ride for twelve years on the understanding that the agreement went both ways —