BIG TALK
by Kris NevilleWhen Gil Bratcher, the photographer, first came on the night shift, he told Alf Sweeney, the reporter, “We’ll get along all right, Sweeney. Just don’t go around covering flophouse cuttings. I hate them scabby winos. And stay out of fag joints. I hate them swishes even worse than the bottle babies. They make me sick in the gut.” On each shift, from his first one four nights ago, he usurped the wheel of the radio car and clung to it with his huge, meaty hands until morning. “I’ll tell ’em where they can stuff it if they think I’ll stay on this damned night shift,” he said.
The city—lying beyond the car like a smoked-out cigar butt, stale and dead—was wholly without compassion. Only in tomorrow’s headlines would the crimes and accidents and domestic tragedies of the
