Soul Train

The Subway sandwich shop in downtown Fayetteville by the railroad tracks is reported to be haunted by a man in an orange shirt. He appears day or night. No one knows who he is. Was. I had high hopes for a ghost who likes fast food and follows a flexible schedule. It was the cusp of night when we arrived. The restaurant was housed in the old brick train depot. It was closed. I took pictures in the murky light. Andy loves trains, so he prowled around the tracks and scoped other buildings. I waited for the Man in Orange to turn up. What I saw instead was a guy with a bicycle hauling some kind of wood slatted wagon. He was pedaling across the street back toward the center of downtown. He wore a silk paisley scarf tied on his head like a pirate and a lush black and grey beard parted in the middle.
“Hey!” I called to him, trotting into the street, “Hey! Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He pulled over and stopped.
“What’s that?” I pointed to the thing on his bike.
“That’s a chuck wagon,” he said.
“What’s a chuck wagon?” So far as I knew it was a brand of canned dog food.
“It’s a chuck wagon.”
Oh.
“You around here much?”
“Yeah.”
“You seen the ghost that’s supposed to be down here?”
He tilted his head. Longish grey and black hair curled around the scarf. He was probably about 35.
“Zoggy?” he guessed
“Who?” I asked.
“Zoggy. A Green Beret. You know. Zoggy.”
“Is he a ghost?”
Chuck Wagon Man grinned at me. “They’re all ghosts.”
We stood side by side thinking about that.
“Whose your host?” he asked me suddenly.
“What?” I said.
“Who. Cares. For. Your. Soul?” he said slowly.
“God?” I ventured.
“Jesus?” he sounded excited. “You mean Jesus?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Your soul is the part of you that can re-invent itself biologically,” he informed me, moving his hands in a circle to illustrate the workings of biology. He was wearing rag wool fingerless gloves. I looked at him more closely. He was not wearing an orange shirt.
“I’m Jane,” I said, offering my hand to shake.
He took my hand and gave it a firm shake. “Robert David Lee.”
“Like General Lee?” I asked. I knew General Lee’s middle name was Ewell.
“Absolutely,” he smiled his pirate smile at me again. He mounted his bike and waved at me as he pedaled into the dark.
Andy showed up. “See anything?”
“Um, yeah. Kind of,” I said. “Did you see a guy on a bike?”
“Uh uh,” Andy said. “Ghost?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But something….different.”
We got in the car and drove up Hay Street. A neon sign on a tall office building burned the message SELF HELP. Another mystery.