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potluck meal every night someplace.
    We could swim and body surf and jump off cliffs into whirlpools.”
    Landscaping “The Shire” wasn’t difficult.
    Hawaii Plant Life had a contract to take care of all the flowers and bushes at the Kahala Hilton. The hotel specified that all their plants would be torn out periodically, and replaced with fresh vegetation.
    Neither Scott nor Kevin could bear to see anything living thrown away, so they carted the rejected plants home to The Shire Plantation.
    “Anything would grow there, “ Kevin recalled. “If you spit a melon seed off the porch, you’d have a melon vine flourishing the next time you thought to look. We threw a seed out from an acorn squash and it wasn’t long before we had two hundred squashes. We took so many squashes to the potluck suppers that we weren’t very popular for a while. If we planted some thing at ground level, in nine months we could reach our hand off the porch and pick the fruit. We had every kind of plant you could imagine growing on our property. Hibiscus and Birds of Paradise and orchids and tropical flowers. We planted coconuts and had a row of coconut palms.” (Twenty years later, when Kevin returned to Hawaii, he found that The Shire Plantation was no longer visible because the trees they had planted had grown so high around it. ) Scott and Kevin began to take great pride in the lush gardens they were creating. Sometimes, Kevin thought that the place must be blessed. He noticed one day when he was approaching The Shire by a winding road high above it that the peculiar conformation of timbers on the roof made a perfect giant cross.
    It seemed fitting. The casual attitude of the tomato farm allowed workers to pick produce naked. Scott, of course, had grown up in a family that embraced nudity and Kevin had no problem at all with it.
    The young women who lived in the big house and picked tomatoes or whatever else was in season had slender and perfect bodies too, and they didn’t balk at working without clothes. Shut off from roads and the stares of tourists by thick foliage, the pickers moved gracefully through the fields with little more on than the bandannas they tied around their heads. Their nakedness wasn’t so much sexual as it was free. “We called them the Earth Girls, “ Kevin said. “They were vegetarians, they didn’t shave their legs or under their arms, and their potlucks were always organic. They liked to come over to our porch, though, because we had the best sunset view. They taught us how to make perfect pizza dough with their bread starter. We made pizza out of everything even cauliflower pizza.” In truth, Kevin and Scott were living more of a hedonistic existence than the serene life of the Hobbits they chose to emulate. They were far more prideful and obsessed with their bodies. They attached rings to the telephone poles in back of the house and spent hours doing gymnastics, building their biceps until they had the definition of competitive body builders.
    “We were show-offs, “ Kevin remembered. “When the Earth Girls called us for dinner, we did handstands out of our chairs.” The pictures they took of their finely honed bodies remain, Scott Scurlock, naked, lifting himself with only his hands gripping the arms of a spindly looking wooden chair, his legs straight out in front of him, and an insouciant, faint smile on his face to prove to the camera that it took so little effort. Thunderbolt and Light foot craved a certain amount of excitement, and they sought out adventures that were not that different from their early days in Reston when they raided the pie trucks and the milkmen. It didn’t matter that they had been thirteen then, and now they were twenty-one. They were grown men, bigger and far stronger than in the early days, but they were still full of mischief. One afternoon, they were driving the landscaping truck when they spotted a sign that read “Catholic Banana Farm.” They looked at each other