DOWN AND OUT
So, you've come to the tropics, heard
all you had to do
Was sit in the shade of a cocoanut glade while the dollars roll
into you.
They told you that at the bureau? Did you get the statistics all
straight?
Well, hear what it did to another kid, before you decide your
fate.
You don't go down with a
hard, short fall - you just sort of shuffle along
And loosen your load of the moral code, till you can't tell the
right from the wrong.
I started out to be honest, with everything on the square,
But a man can't fool with the Golden Rule in a crowd that won't
play fair.
'Twas a case of riding a
dirty race, or of being an also-ran,
My only hope was to steal and dope the horse of another man.
I pulled a deal in Guayaquil in an Inca silver mine,
But before they found it was salted ground I was safe in
Argentine.
I made short weight on the
River Plate, when running a freighter there,
And I cracked a crib on a rich estate without even turning a hair.
But the deal that will everlastingly bar my soul when it knocks
at Heaven's doors,
Was peddling booze to the Santa Cruz, and Winchester forty-fours.
Made unafraid by my kindly
aid, the drunk-crazed brutes came down
And left in a shivering, blazing mass a flourishing border town.
I was next in charge of a smugglers barge off the coast of
Yucatan,
But she sank to hell off Cozumel one night in a hurricane.
I got to shore on a broken
oar, in the filthy, shrieking dark;
With the other two of the good ship's crew converted into shark.
From a limestone cliff I flagged a skiff with a pair of salt-soaked
jeans,
And I 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'll get away and swear you'll stay, but it calls, and back you
come.
Six years went by before I was back on the job,
Running a war in Salvador, with a black-faced, barefooted mob.
I was General Santiago
Hicks at the head of a grand revolt,
And my only friend from start to end was a punishing army Colt.
I might have been a president, a prosperous man of means,
But a gunboat came and blocked my game with a hundred and ten
marines.
So I awoke from my dream,
dead broke - drifted from from bad to worse;
Sank as low as a man can go who walks with an empty purse.
But stars, they say, appear by day, when you're down in a deep,
black pit;
My lucky star found me that way, when I was about to quit.
On a fiery hot, flea-ridden
cot, I was down with the yellow jack,
Alone in the bush and all but dead, when she found me and nursed
me back.
She came like the miracle man of old and opened my poor blind
eyes,
And upon me shone a bright new dawn as I turned my face to the
skies.
There was pride and grace
in her brown young face,
For hers was the blood of kings;
In her eyes there shone the glory of empires gone,
And the secret of world-old things.
We were spliced in a
Yankee meeting house on the land of your Uncle Sam,
And I drew my pay from the U. S. A., for I worked at the Gatun
Dam.
Then the Devil sent his right-hand man (I might have expected he
would)
And he took her life with a long thin knife, because she was
straight and good.
Within me died hope,
honor, pride - all but a primitive will
To hunt him down on his blood-red trail - find him and kill, and
kill.
Through logwood swamps and chicle camps I hunted him many a moon,
And I found my man in a long pit-pen, by the side of a blue
lagoon.
The chase was o'er at the
farthest shore - it ended my two years quest;
And I left him there with a vacant stare and a John Crow on his
chest.
You see these punctures on my arm? Do you want to know what they
mean?
Those marks were left by fingers deft of my trained nurse, "Miss
Morphine."
Of course you'll say
that's worse than drink; it's possible, too, you're right;
At least it drives away the things that come and peer in the
night.
There is a homestead down in an old Maine town, with lilacs
around the gate,
And the Northerners whisper "It might have been," but
the truth has come too late.
They say they'll give me
one month to live - a month or a year is the same;
I haven't the heart to play my part to the end of a losing game.
For whenever you play, whatever the way, for stakes that are
large or small,
The claws of the tropics will gather your pile and the dealer
gets it all.
Clarence Leonard Hay, author.