BLUE BLOOD The Bears still spook McNally.

Super Bowl XX has ended, and Walter Payton and William Perry have had enough Champagne to last the off-season. As fellow Southerners, they decide to take a drive down across the Mason-Dixon together. They cross into Mississippi, and Payton turns to Perry and asks him about the Cowboys game in ’85, when Perry lifted Payton off the turf and carried him into the end zone.

“No, really,” he asks. “What possessed you?”

The anecdote comes from John McNally’s short story, “Sweetness and The Fridge,” tucked near the middle of his new collection, Ghosts of Chicago (Jefferson Press, $22.95). But Sweetness’s question is also at the very heart of a book filled with longing, unanswered questions and, yes, meditative fictions starring long-passed Chicago legends. It didn’t start out that way: At first, McNally compiled stories he’d written over the last ten years.

“Two thirds of the way through putting this book together, I realized there was a lot of death in these stories, a lot of characters pining for people who weren’t in their lives anymore,” says McNally, 42, on the phone from his home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he teaches creative writing at Wake Forest University.

Then the Virginia Quarterly Review commissioned a piece featuring a dead writer, which became “The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All,” a story about a heroin-addicted homeless guy befriended by that famous student of the underclass, Nelson Algren.

“I did all kinds of research for that story,” McNally says. “I read about how Algren always talked with the homeless guys near where he lived. After I had that one, that’s when I began thinking of separating the other, longer stories with ones about dead Chicagoans.”

The meditations of the deceased intermingle with stories of average Joes. McNally reimagines John Belushi’s deathbed, his mind wandering back to an ex-girlfriend and a downstate marijuana farm they used to visit. Gene Siskel taunts Roger Ebert after a movie lets out, and the two end up entangled in an awkward, snow-soaked wrestling match. Frazier Thomas, host of the long-gone Garfield Goose kids’ show, forlornly rides the bus home from work, to the silent amazement of young passengers.

“Frazier Thomas was an icon when I was growing up,” says McNally, who was raised in southwest suburban Burbank. “But he seemed like the most unlikely children’s host. He was uncomfortable in front of a live audience, he gained weight every year, and he didn’t seem to like kids very much.”

In the Thomas of “The Goose,” McNally recognizes a peculiar emotion, a dread that comes with the encroaching desolation of age, a feeling that seeps into each story. In “Return Policy,” a man whose wife has left him attempts to return every one of their wedding gifts, even though they tied the knot some 14 years before. In “Men Who Love Women Who Love Men Who Kill,” a middle-aged man clings to a woman betrothed to a rapist on death row, impatiently waiting for the sentence to come down.

Much of Ghosts also takes place in a Chicago long gone. A kid pretending not to notice his mother’s pregnancy finds solace in the kitschy late-night “Creature Features” on TV. The protagonist of one story trudges around as a door-to-door salesman. McNally wades through with an unsentimental nostalgia, a bittersweet feeling that avoids glamorizing the past. Algren, Belushi, Siskel and Sweetness: All represent a Chicago that cannot be recovered.

“Most of this stuff is dead now,” McNally says. “I began to think of things that culturally no longer exist in Chicago. That was my idea of a kind of ghost story.”

McNally reads from Ghosts of Chicago all week long.