The next morning we called the radio station to see if there were other sightings of a strange light in the sky. There were. We talked about it all morning until Dad got agitated and told us to zip our mouths. I’m pretty sure that Dad believed in UFOs too, so I was surprised he got angry. It was probably against the Bible for Catholics to openly believe in UFOs or something. I never got around to mentioning the shadowy figure by the garbage cans. I thought maybe I was dreaming.
Almost ten years later, while discussing that night with Matt, he told me he had seen the same silhouette, and that’s why he never wanted to sleep outside again.
Black
My brother Matt is black. We have the same mother but little was known about his father, who was an African man named Everest Mulekezi. Our mother dated Everest for a short time after meeting him at a dance in Eastern Washington. He was a foreign student attending Washington State University.
Mom and Dad had split up at this time, though they would eventually get back together and have me a couple years later.
There was only one other black kid in our neighborhood. His name was Larry, and we were friends with him for a while. One time Matt and Larry got into a fight about something though, and Larry called my brother a “half breed.”
Just two weeks later, Larry drowned in the Columbia River. We went to his funeral at a black church in Pasco. His family became hysterical. I think it was his sister who started screaming and had to be taken away. We left early.
When Matt turned thirty-five, he decided to look for his father. His search took him to Africa, where he met several family members but learned that his father had died in 1971 in Uganda. He was some sort of a district official who was executed by Idi Amin’s army after a dispute over a hotel bill. The rest of Everest’s family was hunted as well, but most of them escaped.