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By Root 312 0

town’s main road was named for Colonel John Tipton Tatro. They are the Tatros of Tatro Road and Tipton Hall and Tatro Fairgrounds and, up until now, of Tatro Farm. Having sold the land grant and bought bits of property here and there, they are less prominent, and some have fallen onto the fringes, like outbred dogs. Yet they are still a force. There is always the peculiar feeling that they could spread, once again, link acreage, and take over. Probably not Squaw Man Tatro, though. That’s what he’s sometimes called. His name is really Everett. He’s nicknamed Kit. He’s got an Indian name, too, one that sounds like something from an old gunslinger movie or a Karl May novel. It might be White Owl, same as the drugstore cigars. At any rate, as I drive toward the clarity of my bank account, there beside the road is Kit Tatro, hitchhiking. He wears jeans, a vest of some poorly tanned animal hide, a salmon-colored polyester shirt, the kind that transforms human sweat to toxic gas. The fumes waft in when I roll down the window to ask his destination. There is a method to his decoration that I can’t read. He is cleanly shaven and his longish gray-brown hair is clipped more tidily than usual. That indicates grooming. Yet there is the awful odor. Around his neck he wears five or six leather strings from which hang various amulets. At first glance, I see a bear’s claw, a small tusk of some sort, a brown leather pouch that looks like it contains herbs, or maybe human knuckle bones. He thrusts his head a bit wildly in and says he has to visit the bank.

“Happens I’m going there. But—”

“I know. I stink.” He opens the door and slides into the passenger’s seat. “I’ve been tanning hides.”

I keep the windows open and put the air on full blast. The smell seems more bearable at first when I know it isn’t actually Kit, and then I think of the skins and the whole mess of scraping them down and somehow I would rather smell Tatro again. Every time I’ve been tempted to tell him that my mother is an actual American Indian, an Ojibwe, something about Kit Tatro has stopped me—the sight of some newly skinned creature in his yard. Or, as now, a certain look he has, or smell. At least it isn’t far to town. What we call the bank is just an automated teller machine at the center store. Once the store was named Tatro’s, of course. For some reason the place has recently been remodeled on the outside to resemble a general store out of the Old West. The building is low and square with a tall false front and a sign painted with fake old-timey serifed letters. So in a way, Kit Tatro fits there. A hangdog mountain man come down to the settlement for grub.

“I’ve been doing more research on my genealogy,” he says. “I’ve come a cropper on the great-grandmother’s side, though I still think she must have been an Iroquois. They would have hid it for the shame.” He sounds a note of indignation and despair. “Always the secrecy, the hushed voices! Nobody will say what it was my great-grandfather did, who he married, what she was, who she was.”

“It’s so complicated,” I sympathize, stopping the car, opening my door quickly. Kit gets out too, and we walk up to the cash machine together. There is a light breeze blowing. I step upwind of him. He lets me go first and studiously looks away as I tap in my PIN. The machine offers me a little stack of money; I take it, and walk over to the store to buy some cream, a six-pack of Krahe’s favorite beer, a can of ginger ale, a newspaper, and a muffin.

“I think the best kind is lemon poppy seed,” says Kit. He holds out a root beer to show the teen behind the cash register, pays, and we walk out the door together. A ride home is assumed. At least he’s changed my focus somewhat, and I’ve stopped dwelling on Krahe’s lawn cutting. I’ve always been a little curious about Kit’s passion to be an Indian. It seems a lonely obsession—I never see him with other Indians or would-be Natives. And as the point is to have a tribe and belong to a specific people, I wonder what he gets out of his fantasy. But of course, he explains on the way home,