Close Call by John McEvoy Read Free Book Online Page B

meter the time Shannon shouted at a startled female pedestrian whose angry phone conversation he’d interrupted, “That’s right, give it to the bastard. I wouldn’t take that from him, either.” The woman had first regarded Shannon with astonishment. Getting an even closer look at this grinning goof who pressing his face closer to hers, his beer breath blasting, she paled and dropped her cell phone. Shannon kicked it onto Division Street before he and Lucarelli strutted away.
    A few steps outside the funeral home, Lucarelli stopped to light a Marlboro. “I hate those fucking places,” he said. As he waved the flame off his match, the night sky exploded six blocks to their north. “Hey, one of the Sox hit one out,” Denny Shannon said, smiling, fist in the air. “Old Fuzzy would have liked that, man.”
    “Maybe he’ll sit up in his damned chair in there,” Lucarelli replied bitterly. They walked to Lucarelli’s nine-year-old faded blue Taurus that sat in the middle of the small, crowded Ogden’s Funeral Home parking lot. Shannon said, “Fuck’s the matter with you?” Lucarelli waited until they were in the car before answering.
    “The scene in there, in Ogden’s. Too fuckin’ weird for me, man. I hated it.” Lucarelli slammed his door shut and turned on the ignition. The old motor roared to life and he pressed down hard on the accelerator as he drove north on Parnell.
    Shannon sat back in the passenger seat and lighted a Pall Mall. “It didn’t bother me none,” he said. “I heard they wouldn’t let the family set Fuzzy up like that over by McIlhenny’s,” the neighborhood’s major funeral home. “That’s why they sent him over here to Ogden’s. It’s new, Ogden’s, they’re looking for business.”
    The viewing they had just left was that of Howard “Fuzzy” Fitzpatrick whose liver, under heavy alcohol attack since his high school days, had finally given out on him at age fifty-seven. A lifelong White Sox fanatic, Fuzzy had celebrated in earnest the previous October when the team won its first World Series since 1917. His celebrating continued almost unabated into the following year, such dedicated drinking resulting in an even earlier death than had been anticipated by Fuzzy’s family, friends, and neighbors.
    At his request, Fuzzy’s remains had been dressed in his regular jeans and a black 2005 Champion Chicago White Sox jersey, then placed in his favorite arm chair, hauled from the basement of his bungalow to Ogden’s by dedicated fellow fans. A White Sox cap sat atop Fuzzy’s head. A can of Bud Light had been taped into his left hand, a Kool affixed between rigid fingers of his right. It looked, at first glance in the funeral home, that Fuzzy could be sleeping in his basement rec room facing his wide screen TV, his head back in the chair as if, like thousands of nights in the past, he had merely passed out, not away. Mourners were taken aback when they entered the viewing room and observed this sight.
    “Freaks,” Lucarelli said.
    “Who you talkin’ about?”
    “Fuzzy. Him and his crazy family that would go for a set up like that in there. The people in there gawking at him. All freaks.”
    Lucarelli drove on in angry silence. Shannon didn’t look at him, knowing that a terrible temper eruption might be sitting precariously on his volatile cousin’s emotional cusp. It was funny, Shannon sometimes thought, how alike they were, but also how different. Shannon’s mom, Molly McIlhenny, was the most placid, even-tempered woman he knew—except for her sister, Bridgett, Aiden’s mother. But whereas the normally laid back Shannon took after his mother’s side, Aiden had inherited his close to the surface boiling point from his late father, Jimmy Lucarelli, the low level Outfit guy Bridgett McIlhenny had married much against the wishes of both sets of parents. Neighborhood people still remembered the brouhaha over Bridgett insisting on giving their only child an Irish name,