Col Pot FInds a Letter

Colonel Pot could not make a lot of the intricacies and details of Iguanian politics. He knew on his days off that he loved to fish. The pages of his dictionary seemed to be warming up with all the flipping through them and he thought he had an idea of Charls’s motivation. It was something that Pot came across that wasn’t in the book that made him think he knew a tidbit about what had gotten Charls mad. The other day while boxing up things found in Charls’s bungalow, he found a letter worn and dated and folded many times. It had scotch tape along one of the folds, and the paper was yellow and stained. He found it inside the Samsonite canvass wallet that was stuffed between the walls. He might never have seen the letter, except that the Samsonite wallet was the one little thing that he thought he would do for himself. It was nifty and he was going to hang it from his belt. Not a lot of island cops had a twelve-hundred baht travel wallet. The letter was from Charls’s days in Japan and was dated June 2, 1985. ________________________________________
Dear Charls, I am the mother of Kazuko, the girl you taught in high school in Saitama Prefecture. I don’t know if you remember me but we met in a coffee shop with my daughter once as she was much interested in studying in L.A and you gave us some tips and pointers. She adored you and you were an example for her in her life. My husband died three years later and while I was getting over that I received a call from the police telling me that Kazuko had been killed in a random shooting at a McDonald’s in San Jose. I know you two were fond of each other. I felt you should be told. I am sorry for your pain. She was something for me in my life. Gomen Nasai warui news o oshieta.
Tsunayama San

Pot got the gist of the letter right off — the one thing that was going through his money quickly was his daughter in medical school at the University of Iguana. She had been there three years and Pot worried every day.
The letter was from the past, Charls today couldn’t comprehend how a person in another country could even consider sending a loved one to study in a land where so many people were shot every day. And a thing that amazed him was that so many countries continued to send their kids there. And when Charls thought about that, he could only think that goodwill was like a bank account and Iguania had earned a lot of it in the past, but as Charls saw it, the balance was getting very, very low. Well, it’s clear… Charls was not a flag waver, but his country to him was dear. There may have been something about true love that meant one didn’t have to say I Love You all the time. At least, that’s what he thought, and America was a lot more beautiful before people on TV started spewing off about how great she was.


Diary Entry:

Today I met a guy sitting at the side of the road not far from the Calypso Bar. He was working on a large bottle of Chang beer before noon. He said he was a working diver once and when I told him I was considering going on a tour to swim with the sharks, he said he had no interest in swimming with sharks. He said they eat people and he had seen them. He once had a boat in Florida, though he was not Iguanian. He loaned it to a friend who hit some rocks and sank it. He carried only a radio through immigration on his way home. He said he remembered the islands before they became commercialized. He was sad to see them gone.

Charls clicked off the light and set his notebook on the mahogany end table that he kept there as a resting place for any final thoughts he might have and considered any segments of society that at this point were not pissed off at something they had read, and considered ways of getting under their skin and make them think before Iguania fell off the edge.