"Well, now you're a PC!" he huffed. I like to think I have a little, now and then. It's ever so short in range, and highly erratic, but I have had my flashes.
"Just one thing," I said to him. "As a surgeon who has done a lot of heart work, I want you in the heart clinic on the day these witches say you're going to be sick. It will certainly make a lot of us feel better, and the worst that can happen is that you can tell both those witches they don't know the right time."
I didn't get to first base. "Now I'll tell you something, Wally Bupp!" he said loudly. "I was fool enough to pay attention to what that witch of yours said, and I've had a complete checkup. The heart people can't find a thing the matter with my heart. The devil you say! I won't go near your hospital. Now get out of here and don't give me another word about the PC powers of that fraud."
I let a week go by after that, not quite able to figure out what I should do. One night, after a dinner that Pheola had cooked for me as part of her transparent scheme to convince me she was God's own gift to Lefty Bupp, I raised a question with her.
"You are still sure," I said, loading the dishwasher, "about Pete Maragon?"
"Yes," she said. "He'll have a heart attack."
"All right. Exactly when?"
"The nineteenth. Thursday," she said.
"We've got to pin point this thing," I said as we went back to her living room. "Do you think you are ready to do some serious diagnosis?"