"Don't you let him push you around, Pud Potter," she said.
He frowned as if he were trying to concentrate, and put his drink on a table next to him. It came the way I knew it would, a long slow looping right punch that I could have slipped while writing my memoirs. I blocked it on my left forearm. He threw a left of the same directness and velocity. I slipped the left, put my hand behind his shoulder, and used the slow force of the punch to continue him around. When he was turned, I put my foot against his butt and shoved. He stumbled forward and fell on the lawn, and got up with deep grass stains on the knees of his white slacks.
Walter Clive detached himself from the group he was entertaining and walked over. Dolly came with him.
"What seems to be the problem?" he said.
"Pud is drunk," Penny said.
Clive nodded. "And being Pud," he said.
"Yes."
Pud was standing, looking a little disoriented, ready to charge.
"SueSue," Clive said. "Take Pud home."
He turned to me.
"I apologize for my son-in-law. He's a little too fond sometimes of that sippin' whiskey."
"No harm," I said.
Clive never looked to see if Pud was leaving. Which he was, led by SueSue away from the bright circle of Japanese lanterns. Dolly smiled at me warmly. The smile made me think of perfumed silk. I was pretty sure I knew what she did to make Clive happy.
"Penny," Clive said, "introduce Mr. Spenser to our trainer."
"Sure thing, boss," Penny said, and put her arm through mine again and led me toward another part of the terrace. Clive went back to his guests with Dolly beside him.
"You handled him like he was a little boy," Penny said. She hugged my arm against her.
"It's what I do,"
I said. "As in most things, there's a pretty big difference between amateurs and professionals."
"I'll say."
"Sorry that had to happen," I said.
"Oh, not me," Penny said. "I'm thrilled. I think Pud needs to be kicked in the ass every evening."
"In your experience, am I going to have to do it again?"
"I don't know. He may not even remember it in the morning."
"Perhaps SueSue will remind him."
"You don't miss much," she said. "Do you?"
"Just doing my job, ma'am," I said.
"Most of the people Pud picks on are afraid of him."
"Given his fistic skills," I said, "he would be wise to ascertain that in advance."
She smiled and gave my arm an extra squeeze and guided me through the cocktail crowd.
FIVE
IT WAS TEN minutes to six in the morning. I was at the rail with Hale Martin, the Three Fillies trainer, at the east end of the Three Fillies training track with the sun on my back, drinking a cup of coffee from the pot in the trainer's room. A big chestnut horse was being ridden around the soft track by a small girl in jeans and a lavender T-shirt that read THREE FILLIES on it. A whip was stuck into the top of her right boot. Under her funny-looking rider's cap, her hair was a long single braid down her back. The girl was an exercise rider named Mickey. The horse was Hugger Mugger. He was beautiful. There were four other horses being galloped in the morning. They were beautiful. As I went along I discovered that they were all beautiful, including the ones that couldn't outrun me in a mile and a furlong. Maybe beauty is skin-deep.
"How much does he weigh?" I said.
"About twelve hundred pounds," Martin said.
I'd always imagined that trainers were old guys that looked like James Whitmore, and chewed plug tobacco. Martin was a young guy with even features and very bright blue eyes and the healthy color of a man who spent his life outdoors. He wore a white button-down shirt and pressed jeans, a silk tweed jacket, riding boots, and the kind of snug leather pullover chaps that horse people wore, I think, to indicate that they were horse people.
"And that hundred-pound kid controls him like he was a tricycle."
Martin smiled. "Girls and horses," he said.
"It's probably a sign of city-bred boorishness," I said. "But all the horses look pretty much alike."
"They ought to," Martin said. "They're all descended from one of three horses, most of them from a horse called the Darley Arabian."
"Close breeding," I said.
"Um-hmm."
We were alone at the rail except for the Security South guards in their gray uniforms, four of them, with handguns and walkie-talkies, watching Hugger Mugger as he pranced through his workout.
"Doesn't it make some of them kind of weird?"
"Oh yes," Martin said. "Weavers. Cribbers. Stay around until we breeze Jimbo. We can't breeze Jimbo with the other horses."
The stables and training track were surrounded by tall pine trees that didn't begin to branch until maybe thirty feet up the trunk. The horses' hooves made a soft chuff on the surface of the track. Otherwise it was very still. The exercise riders talked among themselves as they rode, but we weren't close enough to hear them. There was nothing else in sight but this ring in the trees where the horses circled timelessly, counterclockwise, with an evanescence of morning mist barely lingering about the infield.