The garage door slid up on my electronic command. I blinked in surprise. I had nowhere to park in my own garage. My wife’s silver BMW was in her spot on the left, but a shiny red F-150 pickup truck was parked in my spot on the right.

Well, I had wondered before if my wife Bev was faithful. Guess I have my answer now. I recognize the truck as belonging to Ted. He and his wife Charlie moved into a new house about a mile away a year and a half or so ago. Ted is a junior partner at Bev’s parents’ law firm and has been with them for about 8 years. Last week, he was showing off his new truck to several of us at a party at Bev’s parents house. It is deer season and almost every male in town packs up and goes off to deer camp for the whole two week season. It’s been a tradition in this part of the south for as long as anybody can remember. Some wives and daughters go too, but it is mostly a guy event, a buddy’s father’s sons sort of thing. My wife is a girly girl and has not the slightest interest in roughing it in the woods overnight, much less for 2 weeks. I belong to a hunting club east of town with buddies from work, and Ted belongs to a club west of town with a pack of lawyers, a conniving, blood sucking crowd I am happy to avoid. The season starts tomorrow morning, and I left for hunting camp at noon today to get ready. Bev expects me to be gone for the whole 2 weeks like every other male in town. Charlie no doubt expects Ted to be at his camp for 2 weeks too. So Bev

just opens the garage door. Ted drives in before dawn or after sunset. Bev closes the door and voila, one has a perfect setting for an extended clandestantrist.

The wronged spouses have no clue of the torrent affair going on behind closed doors. The fly in the adulterous ointment is that I got to feeling poorly about 6:00 today. I decided to make the 2-hour drive back home in case I was coming down with something. I’d much rather recover from the flu or such in the comfort of home under the ministrations of my devoted wife rather than tough it out in the woods alone.

That is the only reason that I happen to be rolling up here at 8:00 tonight to discover this clever little love nest. I grabbed some medicine at the drugstore when I got back to civilization and was actually feeling quite a bit better now.

Or at least I was until my discovery. I guess I am not surprised by Bev’s unfaithfulness. She is self-absorbed, almost narcissistic, just like her mother. She is gorgeous and flirtatious.

Men desire her and she has the opportunity to stray given my frequent travel. It is enough to give a husband pause. No sense in getting outraged or excited. Cheating spouses is an age-old story. They didn’t put the warning against adultery in the Ten Commandments 2500 years ago because it was a new concept. Nor is adultery exclusive to either intimacy. After all, it takes one of each to make the affair work properly. It might be fun to go in, raise Cain, and make a scene, but that accomplishes nothing useful in the end.

I now have hard intelligence about my wife’s adultery. The question is how to best use it to my advantage. I douse my truck lights, close the garage door, and slip away. The house is on a 3acre lot at the end of a culde-sac. A large neighborhood lake is behind the house with a swampy creek exiting from the lakes’s dam and running in a ravine along the far side of my house and then swinging on the other side of the street in front of the house. This leaves my house fairly isolated. The garage is on the far end of the house by the ravine.

It is unlikely the adulterous lovers or any nosy neighbors noted my arrival or departure. While I belong to the hunting camp, I also enjoy my solitude. I bought a 5 acre parcel of land adjacent to the camp. My parcel includes a pond and a small two-bedroom farmhouse, which is where I stay. I hunt on the club’s leased land and might go up to the main club area to shoot the with the guys and maybe have a beer. But generally, I enjoy my private time down at the farmhouse for my twoe escape from the world. In the summer, Bev and some of her girlfriends come out to swim in the pond and sunbathe. I get dragged into fixing cocktails for the bathing beauties and frying catfish for lunch.

It is pleasant duty as there is quite a bit of exposed feminine charm basking in the sun. Given the pond’s remoteness, the girls sometimes get pretty daring in what they expose to Helio’s tanning rays, to which of course I do not object. Well, tonight I have a 2-hour ride back to hunting camp and my farmhouse to ponder my predicament and plan a course of action. My predicament.

My predicament. In high school, I had been a straight A student and a good baseball player. My family has a long military tradition and I wanted to attend one of the US militarymies VMI or the Citadel. But dad was quite ill, so I accepted a baseball scholarship at the state university that was only about 50 mi from home. While I had been a standout player in high school in American Legion baseball, college was a big step up. I played but was just a solid, dependable utility player and no longer a star. It probably didn’t help that I was an engineering major with a heavy academic load. I had gone as far as I was going with baseball, but did excel in my studies. This was the Vietnam era, so I planned to do my part and joined Army ROC. After college graduation, I went into the Army as an infantry second lieutenant. 9 months later, I was in the Mikong Delta with the 9th Infantry Division. For 2 months, I was assistant battalion S3 and then was assigned as a rifle platoon leader.

Turns out I had the touch for leading men in combat, accomplishing the mission, killing the enemy, and keeping my men as safe as possible. I was wounded once in the left arm and backed by grenade fragments. The wounds were minor, nothing compared to what some poor devils suffered. I was back in the field within 10 days and embarrassed to get a purple heart for those minor wounds given what some of the other guys suffered. Following my Vietnam tour, I was assigned to Faint Benning to train soldiers headed to the war. After fulfilling my service obligation, I used my GI bill to get an engineering master’s degree from the University of Texas. This along with my veteran’s preference landed me a job with a NASA laboratory in Bev’s hometown. Bev was a Vietnam War widow. Her husband had been an Air Force Academy graduate who was shot down and killed in North Vietnam on his 12th mission. Nobody was recovered.

He and Bev had been married for 18 months. Mary, a woman scientist in my group, had gone to college with Bev and introduced me to her at a party. Mary is a born matchmaker, and she heard me to ask Bev out. I was smitten from the beginning. Bev was a stunning beauty, bright and flirty, but she was far out of my league. I had never been a Romeo and had only dated sporadically and without great success. I never had a serious girlfriend, too busy with baseball, academics, or soldiering to indulge in such nicities of civilized life. Nevertheless, Bev responded warmly to my wooing, though I am sure she found my awkward tries amusing. 5 months later, we were married. That was 4 years ago now. I always wondered why a beauty like Bev would pay attention to, much less marry me. Louisa, an older secretary at work, gave me the inside female scoop as she explained, “John, we have a shortage of good marriageable men in these parts. There are plenty of rednecks, hay seed farmers, slobs, drunks, dopeheads, used car salesmen, self-absorbed jackasses, dweebs, morons, and no counts around. But you are a smart guy and have a good job with a lot of future potential. You are a war hero, which doesn’t hurt with the girls around here.

Wouldn’t cut any mustard up north or out on the West Coast, but it is pure gold with the girls down here. Your mama taught you manners to boot. You are a good-looking ex-athlete and ex-soldier, which will put any healthy girl to salivating. Shoot, if Bev hadn’t scooped you up so quick. I have a pretty niece off at college I was going to introduce you to when she comes home this summer.

Southern women in that era did analyze the world differently from their men.

Like most men, I fell in lust with the exterior packaging and forgot to check under the hood to see what made this model tick. There was nothing wrong, but there was nothing really right either.

Bev and I get along, do things together.

Intimacy is great, take trips, but we are very different people. She is a socialite. She spends her days at the country club playing tennis and golf with friends, loves parties, and immerses herself in the general swirl of the social fabric of a small southern city. I am more of a loner, like to read, enjoy my technical work, which is of no interest to the general public, and travel often for work. Nothing is wrong, but things just are not quite clicking either. Bev is the spoiled, only daughter of the best lawyers in town, a woman who values the comforts and privileges money can buy, and a lady with fierce pride. Any divorce from her would be contentious and very expensive.

But if I can clearly prove adultery, I can dictate the terms of the divorce and have a quiet, quick settlement, I’ll just write this marriage off to experience the preparation. First thing the next morning, I returned to town.

The bank was open Saturday morning, so I transferred all of our money to new accounts. I canceled credit cards that were in Bev’s name and transferred all mutual funds to new accounts. That took care of what I could do on the financial end of the approaching storm. I figured Bev would be busy with her lover and not out and about to discover what I had done. Next, I stopped by to see a lawyer I met playing softball in a church league. He was a Vietnam vet, too, and glad to help out. He gave me a quick briefing over a couple of cups of coffee at his house. Without making the adultery stick, I would pay dearly for my freedom in this state. He also warned me that Bev’s parents would be tough opponents in a divorce fight. He explained her parents were both tough, fierce, legal geniuses. I made an appointment for 800:00 Monday at my friend’s office to get the official battle underway. My next stop was the library where I did some reading on state divorce laws and proof of adultery requirements. When they broke the kiss to get some air, Bev gasped, “Let’s go in the den and finish our cogak.” They left, headed out of sight toward the den. About 20 minutes later, my wife and Ted, both naked now, hurried down the hall, which I could see, to our master bedroom. Soon, there was a cacophony of laughter and happy squeals emanating from our bedroom. The adulterous lovers were hard at work enjoying each other.

It was now an hour and time to move. I went into the garage and made my first phone call. The phone rang twice and then Charlie came on the line. Hello. I played Jan’s first recording on the phone. Hello, Charlie. This is a friend.

Ted is having an affair with Bev. You will find them both at her house now.

What was Charlie’s spluttered reply? I hung up and called the fire department dispatch office. The phone was answered on the first ring and I played Jan’s second recording. Come quickly. The house at 8 Magnolia Drive is on fire.

Smoke is pouring out of it and there are people inside. I hung up as soon as the recording finished. I had to move quickly. I probably had no more than about 5 or 6 minutes before the fire department and Charlie showed up at the front door. I switched on a tactical red light flashlight I had bought at Bose’s Army Navy store. I grabbed the metal trash can from the garage and placed it in the kitchen. Then I hustled to the front door and flipped on the entrance porch and garage exterior lights and ran back to the den. In a moment of inspiration, I grabbed my wife and Ted’s scattered clothes and dumped them in the utility room. I pulled a gas mask, also from Bose, out of my knapsack and dawned it. Damn, that military training doesn’t leave you. The mask went on and was cleared well within the military standard of 9 seconds. Next, I popped two smoke grenades and a canister of CS tier gas and dropped them in the metal trash can. The tear gas was from Bose’s unofficial and illegal stash of military toys. With my tasks done, I retreated to the utility room to wait. Out of petty spite, I pulled Ted’s driver’s license and credit cards from his wallet and pocketed them. I would destroy them later just to cause Ted the pain of being without and having to replace them. He was screwing my wife right down the hall there, so a little pettiness on my part seemed justified. The smoke grenades and tear gas canister hissed and billowed out a dense cloud of smoke and tear gas quickly filling the kitchen and then the cloud poured over into the adjacent dining room and den. Military tear gas is actually an aerosol dispersion of fine powder and not a true gas. Regardless of that fine distinction, the smoke alarm in the kitchen began blaring and the one at the hall entrance going to the bedrooms followed suit rapidly. The screeching alarms elicited surprised cries from my wife and Ted. I heard them rushing down the hall from the bedroom. My wife cried out, “Something is on fire in the kitchen. They made it as far as the kitchen door before the tear gas hit them.” One moment they were fine and rushing forward to put out a fire. The next moment they were doubled over, gasping and coughing and screaming in pain as they rubbed their eyes, worsening the burning. Snot ran freely.

“Tear gas is a mean and merciless foe.” Ted cried out. The smoke is poisonous.

Get out. Get out. He gallantly pushed my wife towards the front door. I’ll grab our clothes. During the Vietnam era draft, Ted had some bogus exemption, so he had never been in the military.

Consequently, he did not recognize the tear gas effects, as would any military veteran. I heard Ted struggling around in the smoke filled den, feutily trying to find their clothes that were now piled up in the utility room next to me.

Within a few seconds, the tear gas proved too much, and he followed my wife in the dash out the front door. I heard the fire department sirens in the distance and hurried to the den. I quickly scattered my wife and Ted’s clothes about the den again. I tossed my wife’s panties to hang from the top of the ceiling chandelier for good measure.

It would take a ladder to get Bev’s panties down. The first fire truck lights were strobing through the front window, so it was time for me to be gone. I ran back to the kitchen, putting on insulated gloves, and grabbed the metal trash can with the smoke and tear gas canisters. I went out of the utility room’s rear door, locked it behind me, and ran into the woods. As I passed the lake, I paused to throw the still smoking smoke grenades and tear gas canister as far out into the lake as I could, and then ran back to my truck. It was only 8:00 now. I then drove back to the hunting camp, throwing the metal trash can in a dumpster on the way out of town. Unfortunately, I could not be out front of my house to watch the results of my Mchavelian machination, so the following was relayed to me later by others who were present. I could only enjoy the events variously. The fire department and Ted’s Charlie arrived simultaneously, followed by a growing throng of curious neighbors attracted by the sirens and lights. The tear gas tinged smoke was pouring out of the open front door. The exterior lights that I had turned on illuminated the freakish scene. My wife was on her hands and knees gagging. Ted was bent over next to her with his hands on his knees, taking deep breaths. Both were naked as newborns. Charlie stroed over to Ted, who straightened up as she approached.

Without saying a word, she kicked him in the balls. This elicited a scream of pain from him and a collective gasp from the watching crowd of neighbors. Ted collapsed, groaning on the ground next to Bev. Charlie stood over him and let loose a stream of invective that one would never expect a poised southern lady like her to know. A fireman grabbed Charlie and moved her away from Bev and Ted, who were both still gasping and coughing and crying. Charlie continued to fle Ted verbally from a distance. A deputy sheriff arrived to take charge of keeping Charlie and Ted apart. One group of firemen worked their way in the front door, looking for the source of the smoke. Another team went around back and broke into the utility room’s rear door to approach the fire from another direction. Because of the dense smoke, the firefighters were wearing breathing apparatuses, so they were unaware the smoke cloud contained tear gas. A second fire truck arrived along with two more sheriff’s department cars. My neighbors were getting an Eiffel. Somewhere along the way, some kind of Samaritan brought Bev and Ted blankets to cover their public nakedness. By pure good luck, the local TV station had a crew filming the aftermath of a wreck on the highway about 2 mi from my house. They were wrapping up when they heard the fire department and police call on the scanner about my house fire. They shot right over to join the party in my front yard. There were probably 50 or so neighbors all standing around gawking.