Take Her Man

My arms reached out toward the man falling to the ground in front of me. My heart stopped beating. The only sounds in the room were the bracelets clanking on my wrists and the thump the stranger’s head made as it bounced hard against the bar room floor. I stood above him, frozen in place, and my throat felt tight and grainy. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think of what to do next. This was the closest I’d ever been to someone so near death, and the farthest I’d ever been from home.

When it was done, when it seemed that I and everyone else in the back room was sure the thing was over, time flickered from being a still, silent thing to something real, something moving, quick and sneaky. This was no picture. No fiction. Not a part of the love poem I’d written in my notebook. It was the real thing. What in the hell was I doing there?

I gasped.

I heard the sound of a woman, who I thought was one of the waitresses, screaming, a glass hitting the floor. I could see the gun, pointed up now, in his other hand.

“He’s dead. Oh-oh, my God, he’s dead,” I said, falling out of the bar behind Dame. The street was empty and we rushed, one behind the other, to hide behind an old van parked a ways down. “You kill

ed him,” I said.

I turned and tried to stop to look at Dame. I wanted to see his eyes, So I could know that we both knew what was going on, what had happened in just seconds.

Minutes earlier, we’d been laughing with the stranger in the red shirt and tan hat. His skin was the color and shine of oil. He hovered above our table, his teeth and eyes perfectly white and glowing in the dim light. He’d smiled wide when I told him that since we’d been in Ghana, Dame’s already-shadowy skin had tanned to the color of midnight and my once-permed hair had sweated out into a moist, perfect afro. We were two lovers, mismatched and careless in the middle of a strange place, drunk from liquor that had no label and heat that made my reality a blissful haze.

“I ain’t kill that fool,” Dame said, tossing me back around before I could get a look at his eyes. “He was dead long before I got a hand on him.”

I heard wrestling and shouting coming 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 pushing hard at my back.

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 said 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 choking out of 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. 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.