by Sol Stein
A great panic seized Peter. I want to be living when I die, he remembered.
Elizabeth’s face had whitened. Why was she looking at him that way? She hadn’t screamed as the other women had, but that expression of ultimate fear on her face… Oh, the foolish chances people take in a life filled with hazard. Was she blaming him for what was happening?
“Brace yourself,” he shouted, “before it happens again.” The nails of her left hand dug into the flesh of his right.
Down below, they could see a car with a red light flashing on its roof moving, insectlike, through the crowds, its siren carrying sound to them up high. The car inched as close as it could to the crowd and two uniformed ants got quickly out, conferred with the operator and the attendant, pointing first at something on the driving mechanism, it seemed, then up at them. How could they be removed? A crane? And if a crane, how?
There must have been a thousand ants now staring up at them, the biggest spectacle of all in the amusement park. “Don’t move the wheel!” someone shouted from somewhere nearby, and a contrary cry was picked up by others suspended on the wheel. “Let us down!”
Was this their last view of the world, Saturday night at Palisades, rides, twenty-five, thirty-five and fifty-cent thrills, hunger pangs for a greasy hot dog, and finish, now?
Would it help to pray? Peter thought. If I knew how. If I meant it.
Suddenly a terrible machinery grating came from below. A great hush vented from the staring crowd. The huge wheel swayed. Then it lurched, only a few feet around this time, and stopped, swaying them again. Dear God, what was happening?
From their new angle, Peter’s vision of the ground immediately below was blocked, and he had to lean over the side to see.
“Don’t lean like that!” she said, immediately sorry.
And then the wheel moved, not a lurch as before, but in a smooth pattern, slowly turning them backward toward the ground. The crowd of onlookers applauded wildly.
As Peter and Elizabeth came down to ground level, wanting desperately for the wheel to stop so they could get off, they found themselves being raised again. The Ferris wheel turned. They were not going to be deprived—deprived?—of their ride, as the wheel, now working, circled them over the top again, and again, and again, fear, relief, fear, relief.
“Looks like they’re going to give us the fifty-cent ride anyway,” he said.
It seemed unendurably long until the couples were let off, two by two. Elizabeth and Peter touched their feet to the ground.
Some of the people who had been stuck up there stayed to argue with the attendant. What was the point? Holding Elizabeth’s hand firmly, he pulled her with him through the gaping earthlings, who were disappointed that the apparatus had not come crashing down for their enjoyment.
“Excuse me,” he said as they worked their way through the mob now beginning to disperse. “Excuse me.”
They had a life to lead.