Billy Boy Theroux was resilient if anything, in fact his heritage was a Louisiana swamp, he was of Cajun decent and his papa caught alligators to pay his college tuition, he didn’t aim to have his only son spend his life in the swamps not knowing the outside world.
Billy Boy Theroux ended up at Harvard because his Mammy, in between quilting Bee’s and cooking plenty of Cajun food for her family, started teaching him his letters out of the good book right after his Aunt Greta Theroux yanked him out of the womb and gave him a hard spanking for not answering up right away, Aunt Ella Theroux residing in prayers.
When Billy Boy wanted to go hunting with his dad his Momma spanked him until he changed his mind or at least felt it weren’t quite worth the effort and settled in at the long Theroux family table to read or study. It wasn’t so bad when you got right down to it because his Momma shoved him a plate of Crawdads if he got hungry.
Once he slipped off gator hunting and Daddy Theroux went along with it and when they got back Momma Theroux smacked Daddy Theroux upside the head with a beer bottle and set his head right concerning the raising of their son.
When he applied to Harvard he was accepted and he was the only one within a hundred miles of stagnant Louisiana swamp who had ever went to college, must less getting accepted at Harvard.
They made fun of him because of his fast staccato Cajun accent, but he slowly got rid of that and upon graduating landed a job right away with a large Chinese import firm in San Francisco.
The firm was owned by a tightwad Chinaman named Ming Ho who skimped on everything accept the salary of Billy Boy Theroux and a woman by the name of Olivia Beckman who was born in San Pablo with a silver spoon in her mouth. She had everything she wanted all her life and was groomed for the business world from the start.
They soon became friends until she found out he was a Louisiana Cajun by birth and that’s when the fight started. Nobody put Billy Boy Theroux down and came away clean and when she began ignoring him he took it real personal. The truth was, he loved her and his feelings were deeply hurt. He wasn’t raised up in the social circles of the outside world he ended up in and that was a problem.
He walked into her office one day to give her some files, he laid the files on her desk and marched out and that pissed her off even though she wouldn’t give him the time of day and over the following weeks the resentment and the silent treatment began to build up until there was a chasm between the two as wide as the Mississippi Delta.
Ming Ho decided to send them both to China on his Leer Jet to do business hoping it would straighten the situation out between his two prized employees, but Ming Ho, Being Ming Ho, arranged the trip as cheap as he could by sending only one pilot on his Leer Jet with many miles past the rebuild date set by the FAA and somewhere over the south seas the Leer gave a final cough and went down. The radio failed and everything else electronic on the plane. The pilot did the best he could to ditch the plane near an Island he spotted below. He did manage to skip the plane along on the water as they hit at 120 miles and hour and was instantly killed by a shard of Plexiglas that went through his forehead and deep into his brain.
Billy and Olivia weren’t bad hurt nestled in their seat belts in the plush seat of the Leer as the Leer came to a stop in the water about a hundred feet from shore and began sinking.
Both Billy and Olivia managed to get their seat belts unfastened and began swimming for the sandy beach before the plane sank under the waves, but Olivia’s shoulder was out of place and she could barely swim with one hand.
Billy reached shore and struggled to stand up in the waist deep water and he spotted her thirty feet away laying face down in the water.
He waded to the shore and ran over and pulled her to the shore where he sank down beside her exhausted. He managed to crawl astraddle her and began pumping, he pumped a few strokes before the water came out of her mouth and she started breathing again.
He left her face down in the sand and got up to survey his surroundings because after all he had two hundred years of survival in his blood.
She came hobbling over, her brunette shoulder length hair wet and full of sand. Pain pinched her face from the shoulder that was out of place and she clutched it tightly with her other hand.
“Where are we?”
Billy walked around behind her and grabbed her shoulder and yanked hard and he felt bone pop back into it socket with a snap.
She screamed and sank to the sand, but there was venom in her eyes as she looked at him.
“You son of bitch!” She spat at him.
“Where are we?” She repeated the question.
“I think we may be on an Atoll. I know we were in the south pacific.”
Little did either one of them know that Ming Ho’s half low paid mechanic hadn’t noticed when the long sleeve of his mechanics uniform had caught the little switch on the emergency beacon when he had reached up under the dash of the plane to finish splicing a wire. He had then went to the neighboring hanger to have coffee with his buddy, the plane forgotten in their talk of women and all night sex parties on Height street. Women still flocked to San Francisco to have a good time and the two mechanics did what they could to help.
After the plane had ground clearance in Hawaii nobody knew where that plane was including Ming Ho.
Olivia followed Billy as he began to walk the white sands of the beach, poking here and there with a stick, soon he spied a the tip of a blue plastic sheet sticking out of the sand and gave it a yank and up came a tattered plastic sheet about four feet wide by three feet long. He folded it and walked on.
He came upon a piece of metal sticking out of the sand, pulled that up and moved on with Olivia following him.
It took them four hours to circle the Atoll and return back to their own tracks, on the other side of the Island he had found a small Lagoon which he stored in his mind on the mental map he was making of the Island.
By the time they returned to their own tracks in the sand he had made up his mind to return to the Lagoon and he kept walking, following his own tracks while he examined the tangle of vines and trees which bordered the beach.
Olivia had stopped where the tracks merged, “Where are you going?” Billy just kept walking.
Eventually she started running to catch up as she stared at his back angrily.
In about an hour and a half they returned to the tree lined Lagoon and he sat down on the protruding roots of a large tree and leaning back against the bole of the tree he closed his eyes.
She sat about ten feet away, watching him as he slept, his chest moved in and out under his shirt, his rather handsome face peaceful, until the roar of the surf lulled her to sleep on the sand.
She awoke suddenly and looked around, but saw no one and she wondered if she was in some dream, but the residual pain in her arm and her dry parched mouth told her she wasn’t.
Billy had gone into the thick tangle of vines and trees to explore his surroundings and as he came to the edge of the Lagoon he saw her dip her hands into the sea water and drink.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
She looked up startled by his voice, “I’m so thirsty.”
“Yeah, I know, but you can’t drink sea water, come with me.”
He walked over to a husky looking banana tree which was stunted and about four inches thick and began hacking at the base with the piece of metal. Soon he had hacked through the banana tree; he held the base of the little tree up to her, “Open your mouth wide.”
She obeyed and he t
ipped the base of the tree toward her mouth. Water dribbled into her mouth from the tree. When the last drop was gone she looked at him with wonder. The water tasted a little bitter, but is had other flavors in it that she liked.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
He said nothing as he turned and walked toward the trees. “Why won’t you speak to me?” She asked as she began following him.
“You didn’t want me around before and now you do, is that it?”
“Well, you could at least talk to me!”
He said nothing as he entered the tangle of tree’s and vines. He made his way over the terrain as the Island sloped upward from the beach. She stumbled slipped and fell but doggedly followed him over the steep terrain