Everyone I met stopped and had a look at my fish and wanted to know where I'd got them and what I'd caught them on and if there were any left or had I taken them all. When I told them I'd taken all there was, they laughed fit to kill.
I was just turning off Main Street on my way home when Banker Patton stepped out of the barber shop. He smelled nice from the bottles of stuff that Jake, the barber, uses on his customers.
He saw me with my fish and stopped in front of me. He looked at me and looked at the fish and he rubbed his fat hands together. Then he said, like he was talking to a child, "Why, Jimmy, where did you get all those fish?" He sounded a little bit, too, like I might not have a right to them and probably had used some lowdown trick to get them.
"Out in the hole on Alf's place," I told him.
All at once, without even trying to do it, I saw him the same way I had seen the dandelion his stomach and intestines and something that must have been his liver and up above them all, surrounded by a doughy mass of pink, a pulsating thing that I knew must be his heart.
I guess that's the first time anybody ever really hated someone else's guts.
I shot out my hands well, not my hands, for one was clutching the cane pole and the other was busy with the fish but it felt almost exactly as if I'd put them out and grabbed his heart and squeezed it hard.
He gasped once, then sighed and wilted, like all the starch had gone out of him, and I had to jump out of the way so he wouldn't bump into me when he fell.
He never moved after he hit the ground.
Jake came running out of his barber shop.