Achilles hardly slowed down when he entered the town, looking for the fire station. The station wasn’t on the main street. As he swooped into a U-turn at the end of the road, a man came off the footpath waving, holding a hat in one hand and pointing to the street perpendicular. Achilles turned again and drove where vaguely directed—he could smell the burning EJ: after the U-turn the blue smoke filled up his cabin, inducing tears.

He stopped out the front of the station and ran from the truck as two firemen in overalls moved with hoses towards the fire. A column of water now plunged into the Holden’s windows and streamed out dirty through gaps in the doors. Achilles, at a safe distance, sat in the gutter and watched the water tunnel through the truck and he thought of the firemen and what lay at the back of their minds each morning, before he turned up bearing a sedan aflame. They must, he thought, have felt a warranted pride in their work. They didn’t carry the sack in someone else’s money scheme: they were free from profit’s consequences. They didn’t create problems: they solved them. They didn’t lose property: they prevented further loss.

The police required Achilles to stay overnight in Nyngan to answer a few questions about the ignited car he brought to their town. The tow truck, the local sergeant added, would need to be looked over by a mechanic and declared roadworthy.

‘This is wrong,’ said Achilles. ‘I don’t need to pay any mechanic. I can drive off now if I want.’

‘I can detain you.’

‘What for?’

‘Public disorder. Suspected stolen car. Et cetera and so forth.’

Achilles took a room in the busy Royal Hotel and, needing to get away from everyone, he went swimming alone. At the riverbank he found a suitable place to strip down. A grassy spot swollen as if filled with water. Achilles removed his shirt and pants and waded in, laughing to himself and shivering in his underwear. He kicked his feet and sent ripples to the riverbank. He had no idea what they’d named this river. The cold warmly clothed him. It fitted to his sore back and settled at the neck, like gentle hands on his shoulders. His feet bounced over hard mud and the wire of gum tree roots. A brown dusting over the water. Kangaroos ticked through scrub on the opposite bank. After a swim he planned to have dinner at the Lucky’s outlet in Nyngan. Achilles took pleasure, a little, in the sounds he made when his hands and feet broke the surface of the brown water. Then he swam to the centre of the river, into a gnarl of moving debris, which he couldn’t see, which netted him, pulled him gasping under the water.