The Rhinoceros

The rhinoceros I learn is called a black rhinoceros, and it does look dark, its skin a thick kind of sun-crusted hide.

Our neighbor’s tree is full of cherries this time of summer, and in the sun, when we are walking, I think of how good they taste, those cherries from our neighbor’s tree, when my dad and I, we sneak across the fence and steal shirtfuls at dusk, when their family is on the other side of the house, eating steak in their dining room. We watch them, my dad and me, grilling the meat and peppering it, flipping it once or twice with a two-pronged fork that hangs on the side of their shiny silver grill. And when he takes it off of the fire, this dad that is our neighbor, we know that he will move the plate inside and they will all go around to the other room, the room that has no windows on this side of the house, and with no dog in their backyard we are free to hop over the fence and grab what we can, making a run of it and laughing, my dad and me, our mouths bleeding cherry stain and smiles.

The rhinoceros’ color is like the black of those cherry stems, its horn a gummed black, a mess like it sometimes is in our bathtub when we haven’t washed it in weeks or months and the gunk starts to build. Blackish dirt glued to the white of our tub.

THAT THING WILL GORE YOU AS SOON AS LOOK AT YOU my dad says and I say back to him WHAT DOES GORE MEAN and he says it is kind of like being stabbed to death.

IT IS KIND OF LIKE BEING STABBED TO DEATH he says.

HONEY my mom says but I don’t know if she is talking to me or my dad, because some days she is in love with us both, my dad and me, the two men that walk on either side of her some days, when the sun is not too hot and they want to go for a walk, want to walk and not say anything to each other or me as we go, looking at other people’s backyards and front yards and waving small to the cars that go by, otherwise our hands holding hands and us walking.

OUCH I say and my dad says YEP and we are all three quiet, the rhinoceros not doing anything but standing there and chewing with its giant mouth, open and close and with a sort of side to side, points of grass sticking from is lips, the blackened horn not looking like goring people but like something that maybe is just hard to see past when all this rhinoceros is trying to do is eat the pile of grass that a zookeeper has left here for it.

I see in my mind for a second or two the rhinoceros standing on its back legs, looking like dancing, and running its huge flat hooves over the leaves in our neighbor’s cherry tree, smashing all the cherries with its hands, its feet, standing up tall and trying to get the fruit to its mouth and not ever making it, and the frustration that comes out of its eyes, dancing back and forth there in front of the tree, dying to try how the cherry tastes when you shoot out the pit and chew all the red mash into your throat.

I laugh thinking of the black rhinoceros trying to get those cherries and both my mom and my dad look down at me from where they are leaning on the wood railing, wondering what I am thinking. But they know better than to ask me because sometimes it is nothing and sometimes it is the kind of strange and horrible thoughts that I sometimes have and that they are afraid of hearing, or trying to answer. Like when I ask about death or about taxes or about how come they fight when it is time for the bills, when the checks have to go in the mail and there is a stir in our house like a storm is coming even when it is sunny and just the right temperature. Or when I want to know why girls have vaginas and boys have penises and how come I can’t say dick because I have heard other people say it and it seems like just another word. Or why there was a thing called a holocaust and they say a million or millions of people died in a shower and if that is true then why do I have to shower everyday and up my chances to die like all those people I have seen with shaved heads and something called a shawl wrapped around their shoulders and their necks. My mom and my dad not always wanting to know the terrific and awful things I sometimes think, when the thoughts in my head are going like they are.

Today, right now though, it is just a little laugh I am having at the picture of this black rhinoceros, upon its back legs, dancing, the cherry juice running down its scaly skin. Anger on its face. The way it wants cherries and can’t have them, can’t go against its fat and black dirt body.

And instead my mom just says COME ON, LET’S GO and we go, moving our hands along the smooth wooden beams until we are headed to the next fence, holding back another giant animal with hooves for hands, another thick-skinned something that can’t steal the fruit from the neighbor’s tree as good as my dad and me, our shirts red with juice, our eyes kind of lit up in the same way, like either he is a kid again with me or I am more a man like him, and we are running in the best way we have ever or could ever run.