“We have to go,” Dame said, tossing me back around before I could get a look at his eyes. “They’ll kill us, if they catch us.”
My heart sank. I heard wrestling and shouting coming from up the street. I craned my neck around the back of the van to see the bar emptying out. People were pointing in different directions along the dirt road and speaking a language I didn’t know.
“Go,” Dame said, his hand pressed hard at my back. A strong wind pushed my hair into my eyes and I struggled to see.
We hustled fast, in silence now, to the car, which seemed so far away. One of my bracelets popped and the wooden beads—red, black, and green, spelling out my name in rude, hand-painted white letters—scattered J-O-U-R-N-E-Y everywhere.
“Get everything. Everything,” Dame growled after he’d kicked in the door to our hotel room. “I’m calling Benji. We going back to Accra right now.”
He paced the floor, flipping his cell phone open and closed as I sat motionless in the space I’d found in the middle of the bed. Dame was in a rage. Moving his body around heavily, deliberately like a boxer.
I didn’t know what would happen next. I had to think. I needed to pray.
With my purse still on my shoulder, I looked around. Everything was the same. The same as it was when we’d left the room that morning. My sea-colored sarong was on the floor. His sneakers were next to the nightstand. Outside, the black night above the beach was awaiting our nightly walk. It was still Kumasi. But everything was different.
I closed my eyes to pray for clarity. For forgiveness. For the man’s soul. For Dame’s soul. For anything I could think of. Just in that one second. To try to understand. But all I could hear was bang. Bang. Bang.
“This shit ain’t working,” I heard Dame say. I opened my eyes and looked up to see him looking at the phone and then at me. “Journey,” Dame called, walking to me, “what you doing? We got to go.”
“I—I ...” I wanted to say something, but I kept remembering the blood seeping out of the tiny holes in the man’s stomach as he landed at my feet.
“J,” Dame said softly, bending down in front of me at the foot of the bed. “We don’t have time for you to get all nervous now. We got to get out of here. You saw those people. They gonna come for us.”
I watched as he tried to soften his eyes to persuade me. But I could not be moved. The man I was in love with just took someone’s life. Or was he a man at all? Had I just been lying to myself all these weeks? Was everyone else right about Dame?
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“Fuck!” Dame got up and turned his back.
“If you’d just let Benji come with us ... everything would’ve been ...” I got up and followed him as he rushed to the closet.
“Fine?” He looked at me as he pulled out our suitcases. “You said you wanted me to yourself.”
“Yeah,” I cried, “but I didn’t think anything like this would happen.”
“What do you think the bodyguards are for, J? You ain’t with some random nigga. Everywhere I go, some fool comes up to test me,” he said, frustrated. He threw the bags onto the bed and then began clumsily tossing things from the floor inside of them.
“But you still didn’t have to do that. You shot that man.”
“He pulled out a gun. He would’ve killed both of us.”
“It was just on the table. He didn’t say he was going to use it. He just wanted your watch.” I looked down at the circle of diamonds and platinum hanging heavy and oversized from his wrist. Suddenly it seemed incredibly out of place.
“So, I was supposed to give it to him and then he was just gonna let us walk out of there? It don’t work like that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I know that you didn’t have to let things get out of control.”
“Look, I ain’t no country nigga that’s about to have some fool that ain’t even pointed a gun at me take my shit. He took the gun out first. He should’ve used it first. I ain’t no pussy and if you want a pussy, I believe you got one at home waiting on you.”
“Don’t bring him into this.”
“Well, that’s what you wanted, right?” Dame stopped again and looked at me, his dark eyes seemingly looking right through me. “Me to talk it out and shit? Give that motherfucker my watch and then buy him dinner? Drinks on me? Right?” He turned to me and through his shirt I could see beads of sweat swelling across his tattoo-covered skin. A picture of Mary and Jesus on his stomach; a cross etched over his chest; his grandmother’s name on his right arm; the entire continent of Africa across his back, the northernmost tip near his left ear and the southernmost by his rear. He was all strength. His muscles moved in consistent, solid shapes when he took a single step. Massive and strong. I once loved this. But now he seemed larger than anything I could handle. Almost dangerous. He snatched the bag from the bed and turned around, nearly hitting me with it.
“I just don’t understand you.”
“Understand me?” He threw the bag down angrily and hurried over to me, grabbing my arms and pushing me up against the wall. A vein twitched in his right temple. I saw the devil in him suddenly, pulsing in erratic red threads in his eyes. He wasn’t even thinking. Pressed against me, I could feel his heart thumping madly, faster than the seconds that ran by. “Don’t try to fucking understand me. I told you not to.” His voice was hard and distant. “I ain’t that man. I ain’t him. I ain’t ...” He shoved me against the wall again and pushed away from me. “Shit,” he shouted, turning away and balling up his fists, punching at the air in anger. “I knew this would happen if I brought you here. You don’t belong here.”
“What?” Still up against the wall and afraid to move, I began to cry. Now my heart was thumping and twitching in fear. I struggled to breathe. “Now I don’t belong here? What about everything you said?”