Excerpt from The Marauders by Tom Cooper, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

At the harbor, Wes's father dug into his pocket and took out some bills. He counted off a few and handed them to Wes. Four twenties. Eighty dollars for more than forty hours' work.

They stood facing one another. His father's eyes were crinkled against the morning sun, the whites webbed with scarlet. "What?" he asked.

"Eighty dollars," Wes said.

"That's right."

"Where's the rest?"

"There ain't no rest."

"Two days for eighty dollars."

"You think I feel good about it?"

"Crazy," Wes said.

"Hey, watch it."

Wes bit his bottom lip, picked at his eyebrow.

"There's a lot of things you're not figuring. The gas."

"Eighty dollars."

"Wes, how am I supposed to give you more when there's no more to give?"

Wes walked away from his father toward his truck.

"Where you going?"

Wes didn't answer.

"Listen," his father called to his back, "I want you back here by nightfall. And don't forget the ice."

Wes kept walking.

"Wes, you hear me? Don't forget the ice."

COSGROVE AND HANSON

A nurse called from a New Orleans hospice and told Cosgrove that his father was dead. Congestive heart failure, a peaceful passing in his sleep. Cosgrove hadn't spoken to the old man in half a decade, was surprised he lasted this long. He'd never taken care of someone's funeral and there was no living family he could call, so he was clueless about what to do next. Too embarrassed to ask the nurse, Cosgrove took the city bus to the public library where he sat at one of the carrels and searched what to do when someone dies on the computer.

Next morning Cosgrove set out from Austin to New Orleans in his seventeen-year- old Corolla, a rattletrap jalopy with a cracked windshield and a sugar-ant infestation in the glove compartment. The back bumper was held together with duct tape, and ten miles east of Houston on I-10 Cosgrove heard grinding like rocks in a blender as the car lurched and shimmied. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the bumper rolling wildly in the road like a suicide by self-defenestration.

He drove on.

The day of his father's burial was gloomy and windswept, scrummed with clouds like an armada of dreadnoughts. Styrofoam cups rollicked over the cemetery lawn, and tattered stick-flags snapped over the veterans' graves. The wind kept blowing the purple drugstore chrysanthemums off the coffin, and Cosgrove gave chase among the mausoleums like a cat after a windup toy. Finally he picked up an egg-sized stone off the ground and weighed the flowers down.

When the minister asked for a eulogy, Cosgrove at first was speechless. During the sermon he'd kept waiting for a stranger to belatedly arrive. A lost cousin or forgotten acquaintance. But the folding chairs around the gravesite stayed empty.

Cosgrove got up from his chair and clenched his lips, looked down at his rented shoes. "He trusted in the Lord and kept his path straight," he said. Something he'd heard a televangelist say the night before on the motel television. As soon as the words left him, he realized how falsely they rang. About his father, about himself. In reality his father's path couldn't have been more crooked, his rambling around the country like one of those wandering dotted lines they showed on movie maps. A paper trail of bad checks and attorney bills and court summonses.

That night Cosgrove walked from his motel to a bar in the French Quarter and matched three Siberian businessmen shot after shot of Basil Hayden's Bourbon Whiskey. The last thing he remembered before his blackout was getting into an argument with one of the men about the World Cup, about which he knew nothing and didn't give a fuck. He had someone in a headlock, and someone else had him in a headlock, and they lurched around the bar like some tangled monstrosity, knocking over tables and chairs.

Excerpted from The Marauders by Tom Cooper. Copyright © 2015 by Tom Cooper. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.