I'M REGGIE

Folks always want the story, so here it is, from the man himself, with nobody cleaning it up.

I was born in Tulsa, which doesn't matter, and I drove long-haul freight for years, which matters a little. What matters is 1989, when a load took me down old Route 66 through Oatman, Arizona, and I saw the donkeys. Burros, whole gangs of 'em, strolling down the middle of Main Street like they held the deed. The gold miners hauled those animals out there a hundred years ago, worked 'em half to death, and when the ore quit, the miners walked away and left 'em in the hills to die. They didn't die. They multiplied. They came back down the mountain and took the town. I stood there with a gas-station burrito going cold in my hand and I thought: that is the finest thing I have ever seen. The thrown-away things won. I bought a lot outside town inside of a week. Moved my trailer onto it. I've been an Oatman man ever since, even when I'm eleven states away, and everything I believe, a donkey taught me.

Now — 1997. Roscoe. My blue heeler, best dog there ever was. I take him in to get fixed, routine business, and when it's done the vet turns toward that little steel bin, and friend, something took hold of me. I'm no rocky mountain oyster man — never had the stomach for it, no offense to those that do — but I was raised waste-not-want-not, and I could not stand there and watch those scrotal spheres get tossed like they never mattered. It came over me like heat off August blacktop. An epiphany, the genuine article. Some men get called to preach, some to medicine — I got called, right there on that linoleum, to KEEP. Wasn't a soul in that room but me, the vet, and the Lord, so you'll have to take my word on what I said, but the short of it is I walked out with a jar, and that vet was a professional about it, and my life had a shape it never had before.

Folks ask where I live. I live in the truck. Cot folds down under the ledger shelf, coffee pot rides bungeed by the door, and I sleep like a baptized baby with three hundred twelve jars for neighbors. Quietest congregation in America, and not one of 'em snores.

Word travels between truckers like grease fire. Inside a year, ranchers and farmers and weeping pet owners were finding me at weigh stations holding jars of their own, wanting to know if the stories were true. They were. One jar became five, five became a card table at the flea market, the card table became a tent, and in 2003 the tent became a converted milk truck with my name painted on the side by my own hand, twice, because the first time I ran out of room for OSTERHOUT.

Twenty-nine years now. Three hundred twelve pairs, every one logged in longhand — species, county, story, and one sentence from the donor about the animal it came from. Some of those sentences run half a page. I have never cut one, and I never will. I wash every jar by hand the first Sunday of the month. I check every seal before I roll and after I park. I have lost exactly zero pairs to breakage, which I credit to careful driving and to never once in my life being in a hurry.

And here's how it ends, friend, and I've had it notarized so nobody argues: when my number's called, I go in a jar too. Filed with my attorney in Kingman. Brass plaque's already worded. I will not ask one thing of my donors that I won't do myself — that's not a keeper, that's a landlord. Me and mine will sit in the Tabernacle in the Oatman dirt, cooled to sixty-two degrees, and the donkeys will walk past the window, and everything thrown away will be home.