Excerpt from The Bully of Order by Brian Hart, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A black dog ran up and jumped and licked me in the face and ran off, so we chased it and played with it until we were at the shipwreck with ev­eryone else. She was a two­masted schooner sunk in the sand like a piece of driftwood called the Nora Harkins. The crew was still on her taking down the rigging and some men from town were on the ground, heck­ling. Wind blew us and the birds and everything around, gulls hung like twin­-bladed arrow punctures in the sky.

"If you'd done that first, you wouldn't be the main attraction here, eh?" The man on the ground took a pull from his bottle, looked at his friend. "Sailors are slint-fuckin' dumb."

"You won't be thinkin' that when I split your fuckin' head with a marlinspike." The sailor was coiling line, and he was fast, never slowed. He belonged in the mill with the rest of the machines.

"So says the bushy-­tailed squacker. Landlocked."

"Most ships," his acquaintance said, "they go in through the harbor mouth."

"You don't say."

"It's true. They seem to perform better when they stay where the water is. Wetness seems to aid the travel of a ship."

"They require great wetness."

The drunks couldn't control their laughter, and one of them fell over. "Fourth-a fuckin' July, and you—fuck, stop it. You're killin' my fuckin' insides. Fourth-a fuckin' July."

"Would you shut up?"

"There're children listening."

"Oh, so there is. Sorry for the language, boys, but let this be a lesson on careers. Don't be a squackin' beach-­dwellin' dipshit of a sailor when you come of age. Be anything but that."

"Ignorant stinking loggers. Every last one of you is bone stupid." The sailor dropped the coil to the beach with the rest of the gear. "And I've seen the world, I know stupid when I see it. You, gentlemen, are world­ class. Congratulations."

"Thanks, squacky. Thanks so much." The heckler had given up all hope of control, and he convulsed and kicked his legs, tears streaming down his face, laughing harder than I'd ever seen a man laugh. I was amazed. I went and stood over him, smiling, not believing what a spec­tacle he'd allowed himself to become. But suddenly he came to his senses and locked his eyes on me and kicked at me and hit me in the stomach and it hurt to breathe.

"The fuck you starin' at, you little goon?"

I retreated, and Zeb followed, nervous and quick-­footed. A woman called to us to stop and then scolded the drunks and forgot about us, so I turned and headed down the beach, holding my stomach and crying a little; it felt like I needed to go to the bathroom or breathe. It hurt, but running made it better, and the beach it went until Alaska or California or somewhere and there were other dogs to play with up ahead. Zeb caught up with me and we found dungy crabs in a singular rocky crag tide pool and messed with them and stacked them on top of each other and tried to get them to fight. If we guided them, they'd lock their pinchers on one another and we could lift them in a string. I tossed the string at Zeb, but it flew apart in the air.

A boy and a girl close to our age arrived and wordlessly joined in. The boy and his sister—had to be his sister, they looked so alike—ran off for a moment and came back with sticks and beat the crabs and smashed some of them. I took the stick away from the boy, twisted it loose from his hand, and we both fell backward.

"Give it back," the boy said.

"Give him his stick," his sister said.

"Catch me and I'll give it to you." I got to my feet and was off. Me and Zeb were much faster than them. The boy was fat and ran stiff-­legged and slow. Far down the beach I spotted something black and lumpish on the sand and ran to it but it was just kelp. We stomped the bulbs but they were tougher than they looked and caused us to slip. Zeb climbed on top of the pile and bounced up and down.

Excerpted from The Bully of Order by Brian Hart. Copyright © 2014 by Brian Hart. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.