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

Sarah caught Bergara's eye as it swayed over Sutter's shoulder and gave him a slight smile and a nod, as if to indicate that a secret might pass between them.

Years later, she'd remember the way he had nodded back at her, once, quickly. She'd remember the taste of the dust in the air and the scent of juniper. She'd see the significance, the hugeness, of that single glance, and the luck of having arrived at the tavern, hearing the shouts out back, and for some reason—she liked to think it was her deep sense of pity, of wanting to be there to care for those who were beaten—walking around to watch. She liked to think she had been looking for Bergara, searching him out. But of course that wasn't true. He was just one more ranch boy in a line of many.

* * *

As Bergara lifted his shoulders and thought of his brother fighting in Korea, freezing his balls off, Sutter reached up to touch his collar again and then raked his fingers through his hair, smiling slightly before sending a quick jab to Bergara's shoulder (a true sucker punch) and then, in a flash, a cross that landed at the bottom of his jaw (a countersucker) and sent him stumbling to the left, staggering slightly, and then, closing in, two quick jabs to Bergara's face with his right and a hook with his left to the mouth again. When Bergara stood he looked startled and dazed. He spat a tooth to the side with an offhanded sideways motion.

Truth is, there was a deadlock of sorts at this point in the fight. Bergara with his hard past and his mean father (they all knew how his father was when he was drunk) and his toil in the fields and the way he had learned to fight to the end, one way or another, who had to win however he had to win, if not for the sake of his brother in Korea and the family's ill fortune then just because the word Okie still resonated. Against Sutter, who had all the good graces of the town's richest kid combined with an open-ended, all-knowing sense that he was destined to win not only at fighting but at life itself, to go off to Yale at the end of the summer and frolic in the east for a few years—picking up new habits but never forgetting home—and then come back for a job at his father's bank, taking the train through the forlorn Midwest, stopping at depots for fuel and water late at night, staring out the window at the quaint scenes: the stationmaster behind the window in the green shaded light, sorting waybills and bulletins as the train moved forward, passing through sleepy towns with houses squatting on the hillsides in the wee hours of night.

Justice didn't seem to be factoring into it at all. There was nothing at this point in time to indicate that the pain Bergara's family had endured over the years would in a single moment be sanctified and honored. There wasn't a sense of egalitarian, all-American fair play. None of that seemed to matter. The crowd simply felt the thrill of watching Bergara spit his tooth to the ground. The white, bony fragment in the dust. The glimmer of his spit. The blood on his face as he stood with his arms straight down, shoulders back, eyes glaring.

Weeks after the fight, those who knew Bergara would attempt to locate a relationship between the punches he threw next and the blow that would strike him a month later when a U.S. Army car came to deliver the telegram with the news of his brother's death. One more boy gunned down on a hillside in the Chinese counteroffensive. That kid's brother was in Korea and that put him into a better fighting spirit! He didn't know he was doing it, but he threw those punches in honor of his brother! He hit hard because he knew he'd get hit hard!

A punch lives and dies in a flash but continues on as a tactile memory, hovering between two souls: the way it felt for the puncher, unleashing it, and the way it felt for the person receiving it. Sutter was back on his heels, relishing his glory, destabilized, struggling to regain his posture, when Bergara charged, closing in quickly, jabbing at Sutter's chest—the follow-up coming instantly, a second punch that sent him sideways—Bergara had him in a clinch, and then, after that, an uncountable flurry, the arm moving forward and back, forward and back.

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.