The Lure of the Tropics
You’ve decided to come to the tropics,
Heard all that you had to do
Was sit in the shade of a cocoanut glade
While dollars rolled in to you.
You got that stuff down at the bureau;
You’ve got your statistics straight?
Well, hear what it did to another kid
Before you decide your fate.
You don’t go down with a sharp hard fall,
You just sort of shuffle along
And lighten your load of the moral code
Till you don’t know right from the wrong.
I started in to be honest,
With everything on the square,
But a man can’t fool with the golden rule
In a crowd that wont play fair.
’Twas a case of riding a crooked race,
Or being an “also ran”;
My only hope was to sneak and dope
The horse of the other man.
I pulled a deal in Guayaquil,
In an Inca silver mine;
And before they found ’twas salted ground,
I was safe in the Argentine.
Where I made short weight on the River Platte;
I was running a freighter there.
And I cracked a crib on a rich estate,
Without even turning a hair.
But the thing that’ll double bar my soul,
When it flaps at heaven’s doors,
Was peddling booze to the Santa Cruz
And Winchester forty-fours.
Made unafraid by my hellish aid,
The drink crazed brutes came down
And left a blazing, quivering mass
Of a flourishing border town.
I then took charge of a smuggler’s barge,
Down the coast from Yucatan!
But she went to hell off Cristobal
One night in a hurricane.
I got to shore on a broken oar,
In the filthy shrieking dark,
While the other two of the good ship’s crew
Were converted into shark.
From a sunbaked cliff, I flagged a skiff,
With a salt soaked pair of jeans,
Then worked my way for I couldn’t pay
On a fruiter to New Orleans.
It’s kind of a habit, the tropics—
It gets you worse than rum;
You get away and you swear you’ll stay,
But they call and back you come.
Six short months went by before
I was back there on the job
Running a war in Salvador.
With a barefoot black face mob.
A mob that made me general,
Leading a “grand” revolt,
And my only friend from start to end
Was a punishing army colt.
I might have become their president,
A prosperous man of means,
But a gunboat came and spoiled my game
With a hundred and ten marines.
So I awoke from my dream dead broke,
And drifted from bad to worse,
And sank as low as a man can go,
Who walks with an empty purse.
But stars they say appear by day
When you are down in the deep dark pit;
My lucky star found me that way
When I was about to quit.
Alone on a hot flea ridden cot,
I was down with the yellow jack
Alone in the bush and dammed near dead—
She found me and brought me back.
In her eyes shone lights of empires gone,
For her’s was the blood of kings—
When she spoke her voice inspired high thoughts,
And dreams of nobler things.
We were spliced in a Yankee meeting house
In the land of your Uncle Sam,
And I drew my pay from the U. S. A.
For I worked on the Gatun dam.
Then the devil sent his right hand man,
I might have suspected he would,
And he took her life with a long, thin knife;
Because—she was pure and good.
Within me died hope, honor, pride.
And all but a primitive will
To hound him down on his blood red trail
And find, and kill and kill!
O’er chicle camps and logwood swamps,
I hunted him many a moon
Then found my man in a long pit pan,
At the edge of a blue lagoon.
The chase was o’er at the farther shore,
It ended a two years quest
And I left him there with an empty stare
And a knife stuck in his chest.
You see those marks upon my arm?
You wonder what they mean?
Those marks were left by fingers deft
Of my trained nurse, Miss Morphine.
You say that habit’s worse than rum.
It’s possible too you are right.
But at least it drives away the things
That come and stare at night.
There’s a homestead down in an old Maine town
And the lilacs ’round the gate,
And the night winds whisper it might have been
But the truth has come too late.
For whenever you play, whatever the way,
For stakes that are large or small,
The claw of the tropics gathers it in,
And the dealer gets it all.
* * *