Honor for the Fallen

Did you just get hit on?

"You're an observant kid," The voice was gruff and grave. The man sounded like a smoker, and from what Max could make out from the edge of his vision, he looked like a motorcycle gang member. He had a thick, burly beard, a leather jacket, and dark reflective sunglasses that hid the man's eyes. The man himself didn't reek of smoke but instead like moist dirt and fresh grass. That was the first thing that unnerved Max. The word dwarf came to mind since the man was shorter than the average person, but nowadays, that is an insulting word to use.

"Thanks. You're-" Max looked at the man over again. "Short," Max had always been the brutally honest kind. "What do you want? I don't have any money on me." Max turned his jacket pockets inside out to prove his point. The man scoffed.

"Do I look homeless to you? I thought I picked a rather good disguise this time 'round," The man commented, flipping an old-looking coin in his hand. The coin shone in the setting sun, the light flickering like the now arising memories in Max's head. Memories that had been buried beyond recognition. Max couldn't pinpoint where he had seen the coin before, but it fits into his memory somewhere. The man noticed Max staring at the coin and flipped it towards him, making Max stumble forward in a desperate attempt to catch it as if it would disappear if it touched the ground.

"You recognize it?" the man asked in a tone as if he already knew the answer. Max eyed the coin now in his hand. It wasn't perfectly round anymore, worn away from time and use, but it still had a slight shine. The face of Constantine was carved into one side, while the other had some sort of god figure on it. The wear made it impossible to make out which god it was exactly.

"Sort of, a faint memory of it," Max mumbled, still encapsulated in the coin's details. His head spun, trying to figure out where he'd seen this coin before. It was tied to a faint figure in his past, and the name was on the tip of his tongue. The man beat him to the name before Max could come up with it himself.
"It's your fathers." Max's father. A stranger and barely a ghost in his past. Max hadn't asked much about his father; he had tried a couple of times, but his mom would simply brush it off. The most Max could figure out was that his father was faithful to his mother and didn't leave them by choice. When Max asked about his father one time, his mother finally choked out that his father had been shot in the line of duty and that he was a police officer. Max knew this wasn't true after a quick trip to the downtown Kelowna police station, where they had told him that his father never worked on the police force. After that, Max decided to drop the topic and live with the mystery. Now, it was different; this man in front of him might be the answer to a lifelong question. Max gave the man a stern glare.

"How did you know my father?" Max questioned, flipping the coin in his hand again. The man sighed, and Max could have sworn he saw him slump.

"He was a good guy, kid. And I hate everyone, but your father-" the man chuckled dryly. "He was something else." A silence slipped between the two, where only the restlessness of the trees could be heard.

"Well? That's all you're going to say?" Max gave a disbelieving snort, agitated by the man's brief introduction of his father. With a grunt of effort, the man frowned, walked over to the building side, and sittimg against it, legs splayed out.

"Listen, kid, to understand your father, you gotta understand the games."

"The games?" Max took a semi-cautious step toward the man before sitting with his legs crossed in front of him.

"Yeah. It started years ago, back when the natives still owned the land," the man grumbled. The settlers had just arrived; some men named Pandosy, Richard, Surel, and Aberdeen, who are all dead now, but they settled here."

"Yeah. Pandosy, Richard and Surel were the first European missionaries to create a settlement in the Okanagan Valley," Max explained. Max guessed hanging out at the museums during his free time had actually done something for him.