Stand for the Rhino

None of us wanted to deal with the rhino in the tree. Half the burgers were already burnt and the pasta salad didn’t have nearly enough vinegar in it. I like pasta salad with mayonnaise, so I wasn’t going to touch it anyway, but I had sympathy for the vinegar members of my family. My aunt kept going in and out of the house she’d rented for the long weekend, and every time she did, my uncle would yell that she was “letting the cool air out.” I took a sip of my pomegranate lemonade. From across the deck, my mother locked eyes with me and silently begged me not to say anything about the rhino. We needed to make it through one holiday without a catastrophe. Thanksgiving featured the Spoon Incident. Christmas was all about the problem of “Uncle Jake’s Girlfriend.” Easter was a double whammy: Food Poisoning and the Comet that Landed in the above-ground pool.

We needed to have a pleasant Fourth of July.

For her part, my aunt had rented a beautiful three-story coastal traditional house within walking distance of a beach. There was a fenced in yard with a grill the size of a European car and no pool, which seemed to assure us that we wouldn’t meet another comet. The weather was perfect if not a little on the windy side. It wasn’t until the first burger burned that we thought perhaps bad luck was going to make an appearance. Then, my little brother noticed the rhino.

“Hey,” he yelled, his voice cracking against his upcoming thirteenth birthday, “What’s that rhino doing up there?”

The answer was: Not much.

The tree was not a very big tree, and even a small rhino is extremely large. That meant the poor thing was trapped in a tangle of branches over eighty feet up at the end of the yard. My brother’s question was met with silence at first, and then Uncle Jake went back to talking about how his girlfriend was going to come running back to him once she realized that not every man knew how to juggle up to eight knives at a time. My aunt’s husband, Uncle Jake Jake, cleared his throat and asked if anybody likes their burgers burnt, because some people do, and if anybody does, they could have the burnt burger. Nobody said anything. A second burger burned. My grandmother took the first bite of pasta salad and said the vinegar was virtually non-existent. Her sister, my Great Aunt Jake, who had made the pasta salad, began to rummage through her purse as if there would be a bottle of vinegar in there that she could use for emergencies.

My brother didn’t bring up the rhino again, but I quickly grew obsessed with it. The creature wasn’t making any noise, but its body did seem to shift every so often. I went on my phone and determined that this was an Indian Rhinoceros, most likely two or three years of age. We were nowhere near India, but there were zoos nearby, and they frequently experienced breakouts. Two different cheetahs had escaped around Valentine’s Day and terrorized an upscale neighborhood near the Tsunami Memorial. If the rhino had fled from a zoo, that still didn’t explain how it had gotten up in the tree. My aunt had arrived that morning, and she was so preoccupied with setting up for the cookout, it was reasonable to assume that she simply didn’t notice it up there. She went inside claiming she needed to check on “the cake” even though there was no cake and my Uncle Jake Jake yelled about the cool air and my brother swatted at a mosquito that had landed on his right shoulder and my father told him that if you left the mosquitos alone they wouldn’t bother you and nobody knew what that meant and my mother said we should all take a walk to the beach and nobody moved and Great Aunt Jake whispered under her breath that my grandmother better shut up today she better shut up she better watch her mouth and I kept staring at the rhino.

As the day wore on, our collective patience wore thin. My grandmother bickered with my father about an initiative he voted against that would have given every firefighter in town their own dalmatian. My Uncle Jake wounded my Great-Aunt when he told her that next year she should make something simpler like the cheese plate. My Uncle Jake Jake and my aunt kept arguing over when the fireworks would start and neither one of them was willing to look it up. My little brother offered to do it, but they didn’t acknowledge his offer. He was covered in mosquito bites by the time the sun went down, and he said that once you got two or three dozen, they stopped itching. My mother kept asking to go to the beach, but her requests took on a singsong quality that made them feel less like questions and more like showtunes from the 1930’s.

Around 8pm, the fireworks began. My aunt was betting on 9pm and my Uncle Jake Jake said they weren’t going to start until 7pm the next day. They were all red, white, and blue in honor of our country, except none of the red ones went off properly, so it looked more like a tribute to El Salvador. Nevertheless, my Uncle Jake made us all stand up, even my Great Aunt with her bad knees, because he had served in New Zealand for nearly a week, and he would be damned if his family didn’t show their support for the white and blue (and red).

I was worried that the cacophony would frighten the rhino, but it didn’t seem bothered. Approaching the base of the tree, I called up to it. I asked if it was from India or a zoo or somewhere else entirely. The rhino didn’t answer. I didn’t expect it to speak, but I thought it might growl. Then I realized that I had no idea what a rhino growl would sound like. Either way, it didn’t growl, and when I lifted up a paper plate filled with burnt hamburger towards it, there was no recognition of my offering. Sure, it wouldn’t have been able to come down and get it, but I would have gladly scaled the tree to the best of my ability had that trapped mammal merely glanced at me.

When I turned back to look at my family, all standing up with their hands over their hearts, my little brother’s face swollen to three times its normal size, it looked as if they were pledging allegiance to the rhino. So, I turned around and did the same. I looked up at the rhino and promised with all my heart that I would protect it from all enemies foreign and domestic so help me God.

The last firework was more of a sparkler, but it burst into a brilliant red.

And everyone cheered.