Excerpt from Instructions for a Funeral by David Means, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Meanwhile, Sutter went out through the front door, gathering a few spectators, mostly friends, strutting lightly with anticipation. He had been trained to fight by the family handyman, Rodney—whip-thin, dressed in overalls—who would put down his wrench, or rake, or paintbrush to offer a few tips, saying, "Dip low with the shoulder and round yourself over the punch and get back as fast as you can, focusing your weight on the arch of your foot. As long as you're aware of your feet—even if you're not aware that you're aware—as long as you keep them in mind, you'll win." Rodney, who was taciturn and quiet as he moved about the house, fixing things, clipping the hedge, had fought Golden Gloves in Chicago before moving west. When he spoke about fighting his words had an oracular quality. In the few seconds it took Sutter to walk around the back of the building, where Bergara was standing alone beneath the single streetlamp, rolling his shoulders, in those few seconds he had a keen sense that it had been bad form to call Bergara an Okie. The Sutter line had Okie roots. His great-grandfather had come from Tulsa. But that truth—he felt this, rolling his own shoulders—was buried under recent good fortune. He was going to follow in his father's footsteps in the fall and attend Yale. Anyway, Bergara was mostly Basque, or something like that, a mixed blood that gave him curly hair, big shoulders, and a fireplug chest.

There were about fifteen kids behind Sutter, most of them from town. Behind Bergara, a few ranch kids stared at the ground, or out at the land behind the tavern. The town kids wore genuine silver belt buckles, plaid shirts with pearl snaps, and had hair barbered close to their clean necks. The ranch kids had faded jeans and T-shirts rolled tight around their biceps, and windblown hair. They watched as Sutter threw a few phantom punches and then stopped to take off his class ring, tucking it in his watch pocket. Bergara put his fists in position, scrutinizing Sutter as he reached and touched his collar and then ran his fingers through his thick hair before putting his own fists up. The touch of the collar was the habitual move of a kid who wore a tie most of the time. It seemed to be saying, Punch me first, you two-bit dirt hopper, toss the first one at me and let's get this started so I can get home and take a nice, long, warm bath.

The kids on Bergara's side had watched him fight enough times to know his tics, the way he retreated after landing a punch and shuffled a few seconds with his arms straight down and his chest pushed forward before heading back in. He'd taken much bigger men. Speed came cheap in these parts, but his ability to take his time, to fight carefully, seemed to come not only from the brutality of his life, from the chores he did on the ranch, lugging water lines, working the fences, and all that livestock shit, corralling and branding and shoving, but also from the patience he had learned standing in a field with a flag, waiting for the duster plane, staking out the horizon, aware of the surrounding grid of acreage. Then, with the bandana around his mouth and the flag raised, he guided the first sweep of pesticides, standing as far to the side as possible but close enough to go back out to guide the next release, the sound of the plane fading to silence until it circled around again. As they watched Bergara—in that split-second tension before he threw his first punch—they saw the weight fall back on his heels as his arm began a forward motion and then, suddenly, moved back again as he gave a warning to Sutter, to avoid making a sucker punch. Then he threw a hard jab to Sutter's solar plexus. It was a good, clean punch. Sutter saw it coming, but it still connected. (Some of the rich kids on Sutter's side had not seen the warning move, or the stepping back, and scored it as a sucker punch.)

Just before the jab, in the tension as Sutter stood with his hair fluffing in the breeze, it was possible, if you were looking carefully, to see that he was thinking about his place in the world in relation to how it might look to Bergara. Time lives retrospectively inside a fight. It doesn't slow down. It tightens so that one move locates a relation to the moves before it. The point of a fight like this was to reverse the flow of time, to reduce everything to an effect and cause, and in doing so to erase the everyday tedium of time. Everything that happened before the jab meant something. Everything after the jab gathered meaning in the moments before it was created.

Excerpted from Instructions for a Funeral by David Means. Copyright © 2019 by David Means. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.