“Door’s open.” His voice comes soft and broken like he hasn’t used it for a while; almost boyish. I hear him return to his chair and sit. As I crack the door the acrid stench of Lucky Strikes hits me full in the face. There’s a blue-gray haze layering the room from floor to ceiling. I can see him across the fog, sitting at his desk with his back to me. It’s a tiny room. One whole wall devoted to books. The other three crammed with framed photos of racehorses, jockeys, mares and foals grazing emerald fields. One window above his typewriter with a view through venetian blinds to garage roofs gleaming in the crisp October light. Orange maple leaves sail downward and disappear. His back stays to me. His hair has gray wings now that wrap around the base of his neck. A cigarette smolders from a carved teakwood ashtray in the shape of some Polynesian princess sitting on a sea turtle. He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t move. Stacks of pedigree reference books and pumpkin-colored horse sale catalogues surround him almost shoulder high, in a paper bunker. “Did Rena put you up to this?” he says after I’ve stood there awhile, staring at the back of his head.

“Put me up to what?”

“Close the door,” he says. I follow his directions and now he turns to see me, scraping his chair around like one of those old men you weren’t supposed to bust in on when you were a kid and they were playing cards without women. I can hear the water being turned off downstairs and I imagine Rena listening. I picture her drying her soft hands at the foot of the stairs and straining to hear some clue. “I’d offer you a buzz but I’m on the wagon,” he says.

“Me too,” I say.

“Imagine that. The two of us? Ten years ago we’d be shit-faced and down the road.”

“Most likely.”

“I’ve found the source,” he says without a beat.

“The what?”

“The factory. A taproot mare. Blue Hen. Right here!” He slaps the shortest stack of catalogues, causing ashes to billow up between the thighs of the Polynesian princess. “Had to weed her out from four thousand two hundred and sixty-one hip numbers but here she is!” He scrapes the chair back toward his desk, wets his thumb, and slashes his way through dog-eared pages landing on hip number 773. “There!” he says, and leans back satisfied, inviting my inspection of the pedigree. I go along with it out of deference and start fishing for my glasses. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” he says. “Not a hole in it through four generations. Solid gold.”

“Yeah, looks good,” I say.