The Right Kind of People

Back in the spring of 1974, Evie was doing a deep clean of the house and opened a dresser drawer piled with years of useless bric-a-brac as varied as old bookmarks, a Ruby Falls ashtray from their trip to Chattanooga years ago (odd, considering neither of them smoked), a pair of toy walkie-talkies they had impounded from the boys one night when they wouldn't put them up and go to sleep, bank statements and canceled checks from as long ago as 1968 and the warranty for a new set of tires. At the bottom of the drawer toward the rear was the since-forgotten Penthouse mag. Out of curiosity, Evie opened it and began looking it over.

She had seen Playboy, the global phenomenon Hugh Hefner had just established and headquartered in Chicago, and while she wasn't a fan of it overall, she acknowledged the high-quality, professional photography of women's bodies — at least their butts and breasts. Until then, the only such photos she had seen were seedy, crude, amateurish pictures printed in cheap newsprint booklets and calendars like the ones her male twin cousins, four years her elder, were given by the good old boys at the auto parts stores in appreciation their continued patronage.

Penthouse was different, she quickly realized. The pictures were still professional quality, but there were full-on crotch shots, many of them with the models' labia appearing aroused and parted, some even exposing a gaping, open vagina. Evie found the pictures clinically explicit and disgusting. In place of Playboy's highbrow interviews with the world's most famous, actors, authors, athletes, politicians and business leaders, Penthouse featured a letters-to-the-editor type section titled "Forum" in which writers — supposedly everyday men and women — shared real, first-person accounts of erotic experiences. They were arousing, some of them stretching credibility to the breaking point, Evie thought. But then, hers had been a fairly staid and conventional love life, and maybe there was a wide world of carnal pleasure out there that she had never tried. She had heard of oral sex and cunnilingus, for example, but she had never given or received oral pleasure — though Troy had occasionally driven her crazy with kisses and flicks of his tongue across the length of her body except for her slit during lovemaking. Nor could she conceive of "swinging" or even having sex alongside another couple similarly engaged just feet away.

One story that drew Evie in was an account of a young, newlywed couple who booked a stay at a honeymooners' resort in Florida only to learn when they arrived that it was a nudist resort. There were parts of the resort where clothing was optional, meaning the clothed, partially clothed and the bare-ass naked intermingled freely. Other areas were accessible only to nude guests, and that included the ocean beaches. After overcoming their initial reluctance, they doffed their swimsuits and spread out towels on the sand in an out-of-the-way part of the beach, initially lying on their bellies to conceal their most intimate parts. But as other guests engaged them throughout the day much the same way people wearing swimsuits would interact, their inhibitions slowly fell away and they left the comfort of their outpost near the dunes and openly mingled and chatted with others until, at one point, bare tits, slits and cocks barely registered with them. Then, in the final two paragraphs, the couple writing jointly noted that while they had never returned to a nudist establishment, they had practiced nudism in the privacy of their own home and their private gardens, particularly each July during a day that naturists had come to celebrate as Nude Day.

Now, in mid-July of 1974, quite independent of any overt intent to celebrate a day designated for going naked, here lay Evelyn Grace Meriwether as bare as the minute she was born with the morning sun warming her nipples, her trimmed auburn bush and her inner lips, now moistening either from sweat or from the arousal created by her daring al fresco nudity.

Evie glanced self-consciously left and right to make sure she saw no one and then reached the first two fingers of her right hand down to determine the source of her wetness. It was immediately evident that it wasn't just sweat. This was slippery and viscous and coming from within, not beading from her skin. She spread her arousal between her fingers and saw fine, sticky strands of it stretch and cling from one digit to the next. Not only that, she felt a tingling in her clit and a heaviness in her loins as she again ran her fingers back over her blossoming folds.

This is crazy, she told herself as her fingers began sliding on both sides of her clitoral hood down her folds to her opening and back. I haven't done this since I was in college, but damn do I need this!

She parted her legs, placing both feet on the grass, to give her fingers better access as her fingers began a pattern of circling her clit two or three times before plunging down and just inside her vagina, each time emerging with a fresh coating of her musky arousal. Evie also coated thethumb and forefinger of her other hand and used it to twist, tease and caress her hardened and bloated nipples.

"Mmmmhhhh," she moaned lowly, closing her eyes and imagining Troy's fingers plowing through her dewy twat, his lips, teeth and tongue tormenting her raging nipples, his veiny hardness pressed against her hip, ready to fill her and bring her to climax.

Evie's hips were now heaving, pushing her drenched pussy and her matted reddish-brown curls toward her invading fingers with ever greater force. In the hot sun, rivulets of sweat poured from her body — off her jiggling tits, draining from her straining torso onto the chaise lounge, dripping from her brow and into eyelids clenched shut in lust and stinging the delicate membranes inside — and she reveled in the raunchy, uninhibited nastiness of it all in this moment of private outdoor abandon.

Her fingers reached her vaginal entrance and then curled upward to slide side-to-side against the squishy anterior surface that she had learned from years of experience with Troy would yield exquisite pleasure when stimulated. That threw her into overdrive and she recognized her onrushing climax. She removed her hand from her breast and jammed her wrist into her mouth to suppress the loud moan that she knew would accompany her orgasm.

The taut muscles of Evie's ass clenched and drove her hips and her pussy lewdly upward as the first breakers of her orgasm crashed over her. She spared the neighborhood her usual noisy cum-yelp by biting down on her wrist, but she did emit several low, guttural growls as her hips and legs shuddered and clenched.

After the moment passed, Evie lay there depleted with sweat cascading from her chest and tummy, her pussy a gummy, matted mess with two fingers still languishing inside her.

When her breathing finally returned to normal and her mind, briefly overtaken by lust, resumed its normal function, Evie was startled at what she had done. Even a little proud. She had turned an awful morning on its ear and enjoyed an arousing and liberating moment of private, solitary intimacy. She withdrew her hand from her pussy and studied the copious amount of woman-cum she had produced. She could smell its clean-yet-earthy muskiness, the scent that always turned Troy into her hopelessly obedient sex slave.

Oh, if only I could bottle this, she mused.

Now, however, it was cleanup time. It would never do to walk into the house just like this. She grabbed the garden hose, turned on the outdoor faucet, ran the water through the sun-heated hose until it was cool and then let it drain down her nakedness from the top of her scalp. She pressed her thumb against the opening to create a forceful spray that she then aimed between her legs, washing the stickiness from her sex. Then she turned the water off, shook off the excess water, scooped up her ruined housedress and walked indoors for a more proper shower.

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Pastor Pete couldn't see everything, but he did see that Evie Meriwether was naked in her own secluded backyard, that she had reclined facing away from him on cheap lawn furniture, and that she had pleasured herself there.

He was indignant at so brazen an act, committed in broad daylight, and he fully intended to do something about it, just as soon as he returned to his study, grabbed some baby oil and a wad of Kleenex and did something about the twitching boner threatening to erupt inside his boxers.

It was a vision that would trouble his dreams for months to come.

▼▼▼

Troy Meriwether was puzzled to see a Pulaski County deputy sheriff's cruiser pull into his driveway on a Saturday morning and a uniformed officer get out of it and knock on his door. He answered it and was greeted by a friendly young man with "OFFICER HORAN" on the name pin over his shirt's right chest pocket opposite his badge.

"Good Morning, sir, I am looking for Evelyn Meriwether," the officer said.

"She's at the Piggly Wiggly right now. I'm her husband, Troy Meriwether. Something I can help you with?" Troy assumed his wife had been picked for jury duty again. When she was selected for the jury pool and subsequently dismissed six years earlier, it was a sheriff's deputy who delivered the paperwork.

"Well, I have a summons here for her to answer a complaint sworn against her in Local District Court next week. Do you agree to accept service on her behalf?" the deputy said.

"A summons? A complaint? Complaint for what? She ...," Troy said, confused and more than a little rattled.

"The charge is in the complaint, and I don't really know anything except what's printed on the exterior here. I just need to know if you will accept service as her next relative," the officer, seeming apologetic, said.

"Uh ... sure, I guess. Nobody here has ever been charged with a crime, so I don't know how this works," Troy said.

He handed Troy the folded, sealed paper and asked him to sign the return portion of the service certificate. Troy signed it with the pen the officer provided, noting that the named respondent was his wife, his hands shaking as he did so.

"Sorry Mr. Meriwether," Officer Horan said. "I hate to do this, but ... that's the process."

Troy opened and read the summons and the attached affidavit sworn to by one Peter Redmond, the creepy preacher who lived next door and had harassed them for years about joining his cultish church.

In it, he alleged that defendant Evelyn Meriwether had violated Arkansas Criminal Code §5-14-112, indecent exposure, a misdemeanor, on or about July 14, 1974, on the premises of 1492 Petal Court (their home address) by "knowingly disrobing during daylight hours and engaging in a self-gratifying sexual act."

Troy was stunned, speechless. This had to be a massive mistake. None of it made sense. Then he tried to recall the day referenced in the affidavit, five days earlier.

That was Monday, the day that her coffee percolator shorted out, he had discovered his tie had been singed with an iron and, as she had informed him later, she had gotten so angry when the watering system came on and soaked her and the laundry she had just hung on the line to dry that she destroyed her old, threadbare sundress and threw it away outside, leaving herself momentarily naked. Or so that's how he had understood it. What he recalled the most was that evening when he returned home from work.

Evie became aroused as she described her time nude outdoors, how the heat of the sun on her bare nipples and the open air against her sex made her wet. That night, she and Troy didn't make it out of the den before she had pulled the crotch panel of her panties aside and he was inside her, knowing he should have run upstairs for one of the condoms he kept in his bedside table first but neither of them able to wait or resist lust's sudden sneak attack.

For the first time, she had stiffened him with fellatio before he seated her on the sofa, parted her legs and lapped and sucked on her pussy until she came. Then they finished on the beanbag with Evie on all-fours and Troy pounding her frantically from behind. He intended to be mindful about withdrawing, but when her climax hit without warning, it instantly triggered his. He sensed the first spurt just before pulling out and dappling her ass and lower back with jets of pearlescent semen. It was impossible in the immediate aftermath to determine how much of the abundant fluid in her grotto was her slish or his jizz, so she excused herself to find a bulb syringe and some soapy water to hopefully rinse away any little swimmers Troy may have deposited in her convulsing pussy that might have made it to the fornix of her vagina, through her cervix and into her uterus before rounding third base headed for home plate: a ripe ovum ready to boogie somewhere in her fallopian tubes.

They showered together afterward, gently toweled each other dry and, with the kids away, dared sleep naked as they had in the years before they became parents. When sunlight crept through the blinds and woke Evie before 6 the next morning, her hand snaked across Troy's bare tummy to find the morning wood sprouting like a Sequoyah from his pubic curls, something that had been as predictable for him as sunrise itself. She woke him by swirling her tongue around its spongy, flared and livid head. One filled condom and two orgasms for her later, they got up and went about their day, promising to thenceforth sleep naked whenever circumstances didn't preclude it.

No forgetting that evening. But sorting out whatever else transpired that morning after Troy left for his job at the DMV — that would begin when Evie returned home from the supermarket.

▼▼▼

Evie locked herself in the upstairs bathroom, swearing and crying for a full hour after she got home and read the affidavit and the summons to appear in Local District Court to answer the complaint in 10 days.

"I'm not ashamed of what I did in my own private backyard," she said once her shock and fear had subsided and yielded to an abiding and resolute anger. "What makes me physically ill is that this creepy wolf-in-sheep's-clothing preacher was over there somewhere watching me and doing ... oh, I can't let myself think about what he might have been doing." She shuddered.

Troy hugged her warmly and for a long time, listening and wisely saying nothing. When she was finally talked out, Troy looked at her, smiled and kissed her.

"You know that lawyer we met at the DMV management retreat a couple of years ago up in the Ozarks? My boss, Phil, the assistant director, introduced me to him? I'm going to call him first thing Monday morning. I remember Phil telling me that if he was ever in deep shit and needed a bad-ass predator of a lawyer, that's the guy he'd call," Troy said.

"Oh yeah. His name was ... Solly? Sol? Something like that?"

"That sounds right. Great memory! We're not going into this without a lawyer who can make that perverted little fuck bleed out his asshole, and for a long time, too," Troy said. "Forget that line on the summons that lists you as 'defendant.' I will tell Solly we intend to play offense."

▼▼▼

The Law Offices of Solomon Resnick LLP occupied the 11th and 12th floors of an office tower in downtown Little Rock, a seven-block walk for Troy from DMV headquarters on a steamy, torpid, miserable Wednesday afternoon, two days after Phil put Troy in touch with Resnick. Two walls of Resnick's corner office afforded an unobstructed view of the Arkansas River coursing its way through the state capital city.

"So Phil gave me the outline of the case. Do you have the affidavit and complaint?" said Resnick, a thin, no-nonsense man with outsized wire-rim glasses and naturally frizzy hair that one could easily mistake for a deliberate Afro hair style. Resnick pored over the three pages in just seconds before buzzing his secretary to have photocopies made of it.

"Tell me about your property. Is it wide open for anyone to see anything that's going on out there on the lawn? Do you have any fencing or privacy hedges and the like?" Resnick said. "This was in your backyard, right? Are you guys openly nudist or exhibitionist?"

"No, quite the opposite. Very private," Troy said, then explained the years of work and more than $2,500 he had poured into creating a hyperprivate refugium of fencing, hedges and mature crape myrtles designed to block any line of sight into the backyard except possibly from a hovering helicopter. He had scoured the coverings along pervy Pastor Peter's property line and had yet to discover how he could have glimpsed Evie who, admittedly, disrobed in the backyard.

Resnick nodded.

"Does it matter whether my wife ... touched herself while she was lying on a chaise lounge out there?" Troy asked.

"Not at all. If it turns out the way you say, whatever she was doing back there was done with what seems to be a more than a reasonable expectation of privacy within the curtilage of her own home," Resnick said.

To convict someone of indecent exposure in Arkansas, the government or a petitioner have to prove two of three essential elements of the offense, Resnick explained. The first is that a person exposes his or her genitals to another person to achieve sexual arousal or gratification for the person doing it and/or for another person. Then, it has to be done — importantly for the Meriwethers' case — "in a public place or within public view, or in a manner or circumstances" that the accused knows will cause affront or alarm.

"None of that seems to be true in your — or, rather, Mrs. Meriwether's — case, and it's not even alleged in this complaint, which makes me believe that Redmond is doing this without a lawyer," Resnick said.

"The first thing I am going to do is call the judge and ask him to remove this case to Family and Domestic Court to keep it out of the public record and the proceeding closed to the public, and then I am going to send a private detective over to your house to find out how Redmond snooped on your wife and to interview her about what happened that day," the lawyer said. "I'd like to chat with her by phone one day next week after we get a hearing date in Family Court."

"That's a big relief, Solly. What do I owe you for a retainer," Troy asked.

Solly thought for a minute.

"Redmond. He's that guy who runs that scam church out of the old Hudin's Wholesale building in North Little Rock, the one that Walmart bought out, right? Wants people to call him an apostle or disciple of something?"

"Yep. Papers say he's buying up a hundred acres in southern Pulaski County to build some big showplace church the size of a coliseum that'll have retirement homes for his flock and some kind of water park," Troy said. "He kept pestering us to come to his church til we told him to go pound sand."

"Tell you what. You pay for the private eye, the court costs and any expenses I have and we'll call it even. I'll do the rest pro bono. This shouldn't take more than a few hours tops anyway if my guess is right," Resnick said. "Redmond hurt the wrong people a few years ago, and I intend to make him pay. That's compensation enough for me."

Two days later, a burly, well-dressed man who went by the nickname "Zugs" knocked on the Meriwethers' door. He handed Evie a business card identifying himself as Zachary Greene of Confidential Investigations Ltd., and added that Solly Resnick had sent him over to examine and photograph the property and to complete an interview with her on the details of that day.

It took Zugs just 30 minutes examining the boxwoods to find the half-inch gap between the warped vertical boards that gave Pastor Pete the narrow peephole he needed to spy on Evie that day. He took detailed photos of everything, instructing Evie to stand where she was at the relevant moments alleged in the affidavit, and to place the chaise lounge in approximately the same spot and at the same angle as it had been. Zugs photographed all of that, too.