AEgypt by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page A

Mike's lunch. Mike's lunch was the last. She wrestled the great wagon out of its parking place, craning her neck to see whom she might run over; the power steering cried out, oil smoke farted from the tailpipe, the dogs barked. Rosie went west across the bridge and out of town, thinking: the last.
* * * *
    From Blackbury Jambs to Cascadia, the river takes on briefly a broad, quick lordliness; there are paper mills and furniture mills and a few tall brick chimneys along this stretch, and the river is walled and channeled here and there. Most of this work from the Iron Age is derelict now, the mills mostly stand windowless and the riparian works are crumbling; visitors to the Faraways in the last century complained bitterly about dark satanic mills and the intrusion of the Great God Dollar into sylvan loveliness, but the rosy brick and calm desuetude of the old factories seem harmless enough today, even romantic in certain weathers. One small ivy-clad block, once a chair factory, is a kind of monastery now; there are open services on weekends, and ecstatic dancing. The crowd there even makes and sells herbal remedies and cordials, but there are old cars in the yard, and crumb-crushing equipment, they aren't celibate who live there. Others of the old places are still marginally alive, doing a little warehousing or renting space to small businesses.
    Rosie turned in at one of these, a corner of which housed Bluto's Automotive. Its sign showed a grinning, black-bearded cartoon brute in full stride, crushing a muffler in one paw and holding a wrench in the other; the resident mechanic, though, was a chinless, weedy guy with a thin fair beard and a prominent Adam's apple, scholarly-looking in rimless glasses. He looked at the rearview mirror Rosie handed him as though he'd never seen anything resembling it before, but if given time for study would figure out its purpose.
    "It glues on,” Rosie said.
    He put its chrome foot to the spot on the window where it had come from. It didn't cling there.
    "I can't see behind me,” Rosie said. “Can't see where I've been."
    "Epoxy,” he said thoughtfully. “Give me a minute."
    He went off with the mirror into his shop. Rosie let the patient dogs out of the car—they flowed smoothly out as soon as they understood it was permitted, and went racing after each other around the littered yard; they might, Rosie thought, melt like Sambo's tigers in this heat, churn themselves into buttermilk. She wandered to the brick embankment, iced with broken concrete, which ended the yard at the river's edge, and leaned her elbows there. Bending forward and stretching she could see, far downstream, the towers of Butterman's lifting themselves out of the river and the midday haze like a fairy castle.
    Even along this deep and almost lakelike part of the Blackbury there are islands large and small that put out their heads; and on one of them someone named Butterman once built a castle. A real castle, with turrets and outworks and machicolations; across one red stone face he had his name carved in tall Gothic letters, BUTTERMAN'S, and inside there was a beer garden and a variety theater. The commonalty on excursion to the Faraways a hundred years ago needed to go no farther than here. A steamer then plied the river all summer long, starting from a special steel pier at Cascadia (Gateway to the Faraways) and calling at Butterman's on its way to Blackbury Jambs, and then again on its return to Cascadia. Butterman's is a ruin now, and the dock at Blackbury Jambs is gone, though the water-stairs remain; Rosie's uncle Boney could remember the steamer, and she often used to imagine it, holiday-makers in white clothes, the tooting steam whistle and the striped awnings. And though she had never been inside the ruin of Butterman's, she always meant to organize an expedition there, when she was grown up and needed no permission, because Butterman's, at least partly, was hers.
    The Rasmussen holdings in the Faraways are