AUGUST 2024
by John M. Del Vecchio
Excerpted from New York Times bestselling author, John M. Del Vecchio’s latest novel: August 2024
August 2048
It’s cold. Colder than August. Wind blows across the unkempt field bringing milkweed parachutes. Much too early. I grab at them as they sweep by the root cellar. From above a crow…damn biggest crow you ever saw…caws at me. I answer back, “Caaaah!” The bird is not friendly. There are new rodent trails below the door. Double damn.
My limbs are swollen. My fingers stiff, and my wrists and arms barely mobile. I write like G-ma who did not like to keyboard, and like others without the power to be digital or with fear of being so. I write now, in my 38th year, with an old instrument. A pencil. On paper that hasn’t been burned. I write in the hopes…no, there is no hope…I write because I must. Because we have been vilified. We have been debased. We are being de- stroyed. Despite meritorious efforts, we have been reduced.
I write because I must.
I write about what happened 24 years ago, about that summer, about August 2024.
The month had just begun. It wasn’t yet my birthday. We were on the road. In The Truck. All night. We drove only at night. I should say Serafino drove — I called him Sal, he called me Ang when he wasn’t calling me Squeak or Mouse Turd or any of the other names he used. Sal drove The Truck that G-pa brought out in July before Mom succumbed. Sal didn’t talk. Or maybe he did. I was numb. Everyone left was numb.
Shit! Okay, I gotta back up. We kinda built it. The Truck. G-pa did most. He got it when we were like eight and ten — a rusty bucket of bolts with tires smooth as the ice cream melting off the tops of the cones he’d buy us. This was near his house in the hilly…well, best not to say but it was 2,000 miles from ours, and G-pa bought The Truck for us to rebuild with him during our summer visits. In his barn. That first year — maybe 2018 — pieces all over the place, outside, covered with tarps. In the barn just the chassis of the ’69 Ford F-100. We sanded. He welded. We sanded more to get the rust off and expose the weak spots. It was hot. Rust dust got up yer nose. It covered yer legs. Even after G-ma pushed me into the shower my legs were still orange.
More later about G-pa and The Truck. That’s what we called it — The Truck. But know, by the time he brought it to us…hmmmm, G-pa was old. Maybe 80. Maybe a few years less. In those last few years Sal became like a muscleman. G-pa with his red face and white beard looked like a street-Santa, except usually in stained and dirty work clothes. He didn’t have the strength to handle tires, much less transmissions or engines even when they were on the chain hoist, and me…truthful…well, truthful I wanted to be like Sal but I was a girl even if I wouldn’t admit it and identified as a boy…but then I didn’t give a shit…
You must think me terrible talking like this. But…when you know the story, then you can judge.
July 2024
“Gee-Pa, what are you doing here?!” Sal and Ang were about to take down the flag. It was no longer the 4th. “Is that The Truck?” Neither had heard it pull in.
The old man winced as he turned to drop from the cab. Sal reached up to help him but instead got smothered in a bearhug. Ang stared. “It’s green,” she squeaked, laughed. “It’s really really green.” G-pa pulled her into the communal bearhug. She hugged him back, squiggled out of the scrum, said, “I mean really really really green.”
G-pa smiled broadly. His eyes twinkled. He really did seem to be Santa. “Let me go inside. I gotta pee. Then I’ll show it to you. Yer Mom home?”
The truck was indeed green, a matte deep-forest green with matte black trim. Even the camper cap they’d built the summer before covid — the sides plywood, the curved roof, teak slats — was that same deep forest green. The tires were black, no white lettering, the wheels matte black.
To Sal Ang said, “I thought we were going to poly the slats so the wood showed.”
Sal ignored the comment, said, “How come we didn’t hear him drive in. He couldn’t a made it EV, could he?”
Ang made one of her silly faces, her lips shut, her jaw pulled back, her eyebrows arched. “Looks different than last…”
“Yeah. Not just the paint. It kinda sits different, doesn’t it? What’s GeePa doing here? Weren’t we supposed to go there?”
The ’69 F-100 was a classic, but it was no brute, more light- duty than bulldog. The siblings were baffled.
More baffling: G-pa drove out, came without G-ma. And he didn’t come out to take them someplace or to do something special. He went inside, didn’t come back out. Sal and Ang went in. G-pa and their mom were in the breakfast nook, talking, Mom imperceptibly shaking her head. “…ebola vaccines in Colorado…shedding…Chinese troops…sleeper cells…high energy weapons from space…cusp of World War III…” They all knew that G-pa was kind and generous and a history buff, but they also knew he was a kook.
“Ellen,” G-pa’s voice was raspy, urgent. “I’m serious.”
She pursed her lips. There was more than a generational di- vide between them, more than a gender gap, more than a west coast-heartland chasm. The old man, a veteran, was forever up- set at the misrecording of history, was forever reading books and documents. He’d worked physical jobs much of his life, was hardier than men 20 years younger. “I don’t know, Pa, and I don’t want to know. That’s never going to happen. They wouldn’t let any of that happen.”
“Pretending it’s not,” G-pa exhaled, seemed to deflate, qui- etly said, “is a recipe for disaster. Just know, if the shit hits the fan, you and the kids have a place to go.”
More adult conversations: blah blah blah. Sal and Ang avoid the breakfast nook. They had not gone to G-pa’s the past two summers, had not worked on The Truck. First the pandemic restricted travel, then Dad…G-pa had been furious. Not at family. Dad had been super-healthy, was a CPA for the coffee roasters and doubled at the rodeo and as a fishing guide. Healthy like the proverbial horse. In the hospital the doctors were heroic. They did everything they could — his lungs were congested, they started him on remdesivir, his lungs began filling with fluid, that’s what they said, and they put him on a ventilator. His kidneys shut down and fluid deluged his lungs and suffocated him. Ellen said she didn’t know how, because travel was re- stricted, but G-pa and G-ma came out for the funeral. They weren’t allowed to attend. No one was allowed to attend.
Morning: Sal and Ang were in the kitchen making toast, scavenging in the fridge for whatever attracted them. Ellen’s car was gone, meaning she’d left for work. The Truck was where G-pa had parked it the day before. “We could make him bacon and eggs,” Ang said.
Sal smirked. “Bacon?! When was the last time we had bacon in this house?”
“Well, eggs then. And maybe avocado on toast.” She turned to look toward the stairs as if she’d see G-pa descending, coming down for breakfast. Instead she heard the backdoor open.
“Daylight’s burnin’ and I’m flyin’ out at noon. We got a lot a ground to cover.”
“Huh? Gee-pa, you just got here…”
“chii chii chii.” The odd sound G-pa made when he wanted us to shut up and listen. “There are things happening right now…about to happen…I…Look, what I want you to do is come out and go over The Truck. It’s…ummm…modified.”
Sal smiled. To Ang he said, “I told you it didn’t sit the same.”
Outside G-pa was focused, Ang astounded, Sal sober. The kids mostly listened, looked, prodded this or that. G-pa rambled, just like he did every summer when they were in his barn, babbling, or showing them the root cellar under the barn or the ‘hidden’ one down by the brook, or as he called it, the crik.
Between explanations and ramblings, he held his grandchildren. Short hugs, pats on their shoulders. Then more about the barn, and about, of all things, glial cells and memory and how to recall things you never knew you saw or heard or smelled or knew, but that your mind recorded while your focus was elsewhere. Sal and Ang listened. What else could they do?
He unlocked The Truck. It was clean, the bench seat was up- holstered, the column shift-lever had an iridescent green ball at the end. It looked like the truck they’d worked on during those ‘summer camps’ at G-pa’s, except for the paint…looked now like a brand new ’69 Ford…but not shiny. G-pa began touching things. “Ricky…You remember him. He helped us a few summers. It’s a bit more than restored.”
With that G-pa showed Sal and Ang unexpected modification. He opened the hood, the doors, the tailgate, the camper cap.
“That’s not the engine…” Sal began.
“No. The I-6 240 was fine in sixty-nine but…” “And the tranny…”
“Eight speed auto.”
Ang butted in, “Then why’s there three on the column…”
G-pa chortled. “Let ’em think it’s still that. It’s a sleeper. You don’t need to let anyone know…”
Sal’s face scrunched quizzically. “How the heck did you…” Ang jabbed him in the ribs. “Just like yer Legos…”
“Here. Let me show you.” With that G-pa pressed the steering wheel at 10 o’clock. There were two soft spots. “Paddle shifters,” he said. Then he touched a dashboard panel which dropped open. “Gears. Reverse, park…” He pressed another panel, “Lights. Hi and low beams and running lights are all normal for the ’69, but in here you’ve got red tactical and there’s night daggers hidden in the top of the camper cap that’ll give you a five- hundred-meter beam. Red interiors, too.” He opened the ashtray. “PTOs and fire-starters.”
Sal’s eyes were popping. “Holy shit!”
Ang said, “Inspector Gadget meets James Bond.” “Yeah, No Time to Die.”
G-pa pulled out an under-seat drawer. “When you shouldn’t use lights, NVGs, night vision goggles. And if…gas masks.”
“What?!”
G-pa went on and on, walking around The Truck, pushing panels and buttons, pulling levers, twisting knobs. Nothing was digital. “…standard nineteen-gallon gas tank plus axillary fifteens built into the sides of the body…eight hundred, maybe a thousand-mile range…”
Between items he prattled like he had during the summers in the barn, but now he seemed both more intense and more removed. “…what we see is not always what is. Often societies build and reinforce belief systems based on flawed assumptions…may last years, centuries, millenniums…wars over false beliefs…good men die, corrupt reap the profits…”
Then, “All this is protected by a faraday screen…” Ang did not understand. Sal canted his head, clenched, unclenched, clenched his fists. In the roof of the cab there was another nearly invisible compartment. “…medical supplies. The bottles are labeled and there’s instructions on when and how to use…” And back to the prattle “…imbalances in the historical rec- ord…accepted narratives…what is said may be true but what is omitted makes it false…” In the camper, into the legs holding the bed/bench, “…silver rounds. Ounce and half-ounce for barter.” Outside, “…heat shield material so your image is less likely to be picked up.”
Ang was lost, thought, What the hell does that mean? With a contorted face she looked up at G-pa. He didn’t smile, but to her his face glowed. “Forget the politics. Just know if something happens you must react. You don’t need to tell anyone why.”
He hugged her. Pulled Sal in…communal bearhug. But this one didn’t stop. He held his grandchildren. Sal began thinking it was really weird. Ang squiggled. Finally, he let them go.
“My Uber’s here.” He got in and was off. It was the last time they saw G-pa.
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About the Author: John M. Del Vecchio is the author of five books, including The 13th Valley, a finalist for the National Book Award; most recently DEMISE: A Novel of Race, Culture Wars, and Falling Darkness, a penetrating novel of a man fighting his demons in a town struggling with tragedy; For the Sake of All Living Things, a bestseller which deals with the Cambodian holocaust; The Bremer Detail (with Frank Gallagher) about protecting the US ambassador in Iraq from 2003 to 2004; and Carry Me Home, a complex story of veteran homecoming, PTSD, reconciliation and recovery.
Del Vecchio’s books have sold approximately 1.4 million copies. He has also written hundreds of articles and the thesis “The Importance of Story.” Del Vecchio was drafted and sent to Vietnam in 1970, where he served as a combat correspondent in the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile). In 1971, he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for heroism in ground combat. He also served in Europe with the 72d Field Artillery Group. Along with social commentary, Del Vecchio loves alpine climbing: visit his blog: peakingat70.com.