THE SLUGS COME OUT WHEN IT RAINS by Richard Spilman

When you signed the lease, you were already halfway there. With your income, in a city of three hundred thousand, you can afford to be picky, but you chose a hotel on the decaying south side renovated into apartments. Two bedrooms, a living room, and kitchen for eight hundred a month – with a gym on the ground floor facing one street; Dunkin’ Donuts, T‑Mobile and GameStop facing the other; and for security, an old man in a booth next to the elevator.
The complex occupies a corner at the intersection of Broadway and Thirty-first, where, a hundred years ago, the elite of the city strolled, far from the vulgarities of life downtown. Nearby, someone’s gutting a warehouse for condos, but so far gentrification hasn’t changed the neighborhood. It’s still seedy motels and seedier houses, fast food and bodegas, churches that double as recovery centers, and empty storefronts without even a For Sale sign to suggest hope. In your building the tenants are mostly young like you: artists and computer geeks and teachers and med techs. You’re the only stockbroker, if that’s what you are.
Evenings, you work out in the gym; mornings, you sit in the donut shop and exercise your mouth, talking politics and sports with old folks who can’t afford to live anywhere else. Pretty soon, the rents will rise, and they’ll be gone, but for now they seem happy to have young people around. When the sugar kicks in, you strap on your cuff clips and pedal to work.
Work is downtown, where the empty storefronts feature For Sale signs from commercial realtors. You walk your bike through a lobby bare of furnishings save a board beside the elevator listing the names and numbers of businesses upstairs. Inside the elevator, stainless steel reflects blurry images of you and the bike, and the red eye of a camera keeps track of everything.
On the sixth floor, there’s dark wood and deep carpet, and fear. Nothing ever goes right where money is concerned. The bike ends up in a storage room, and in your office you dress in clothing picked up and delivered twice a week by a dry cleaner.
Beth, the receptionist, barges in with your appointments and slaps you on the butt. “Morning, Slug.”
“Close the damned door.”
She shimmies out leaving it open. A nice tight package, which you wouldn’t mind unwrapping, but she feeds further up the food chain.
You watch her arranging magazines in the reception area. “Nice ass.”
“You should have called Naomi. She thinks you’re cute.”
Naomi is the latest of a string of women whose pictures she’s sent you. It bothers her when you’re not getting laid.
Before shutting the door, you fix the nameplate, which has slipped part-way out. “William Cochran, Wealth Advisor.” You’re the only one in the office with a nameplate that slides in and out.
As low man on the totem, William Cochran does cold calls and handles street traffic. The people who consult him are mostly small timers, worried about retirement. If a rich person wanders in, he’s supposed to bump them up to one of the Bigs – Beth’s name for the Wealth Managers, whose nameplates screw into the door. But the Bigs aren’t that watchful, and William Cochran does not always do what he’s told.
Certainly this is not the job you had in mind when you signed on, but it’s better than the insurance company that hired you out of college – hard to sell a product that reminds people they’re going to die. Maybe you don’t make a lot of money, but you make enough and you don’t have to work that hard.
Years ago, in college, when the country was reeling and everyone hated brokers, you thought, that’s what I want. Millions back and forth with the speed of an electron, life and death hanging on every trade. Indiana Jones in a suit. In reality you peddle mutual funds and annuities, and sometimes a hedge fund or two. Might as well be selling auto parts.
From your messenger bag you take a couple of files and a camera, and wave the camera at Beth.
“Put it back in your pants,” she says, “or I’ll shove it where the sun don’t shine.”
No need to ask which of the many sunless places in your life she has in mind. “I’ll be making calls.” You shut the door and, when the latch clicks, give her the finger. She doesn’t talk that way to the Bigs.
She’s scheduled three appointments and, for each, provided a snazzy folder with the customer’s name on it. You glance through the notes, but there’s no need to prepare – their wants are small and you’re not allowed to improvise. So you pull out your cold call sheets – from an online retailer, a time-share outfit and a dentists’ organization. Cold calls don’t work in the morning, but what the hell? They don’t work in the afternoon either, and you’re not paid enough for evenings. Mostly it’s answering machines and hangups, and conversations that go nowhere – so you do a little photo editing to pass the time. You don’t bother leaving messages. You put a little check by the name and call later.
An entire morning and you reel in two people, maybe. A third guy rants, and you listen while you try to get the glare out of a photo you took of two prostitutes fighting on a streetcorner. He remembers your company during the Great Recession. Hopeless mortgages packaged as derivatives and sold as if they were gold.
“How much of that shit did you sell, little boy?”
None, you tell him. You didn’t work for the company then. The people who did those things are gone and the company has an A+ from the BBB.
“A for Assholes,” the man says, and reluctantly, because you’re still having trouble with the glare, you hang up on him.
In parting you say, “At least we’re A+ assholes.”
Meanwhile, the Bigs drag in, and the sounds of their passage mix with the dial tones in your ear. When you slip out to pee, Kiplinger rolls from his office and shouts down the hall, “Where the hell is Holloway?” as if Holloway were a package Beth forgot to track.
She doesn’t say, “How the hell should I know?” She says, “You want me to call his cell?”
Holloway doesn’t like calls to his cell, and he’s made sure everyone here knows it. “Try the damned office,” Kip moans. “Do I have to do everything?”
“I called his office. They said he’s on his way.”
Then Kip sees you. “What the fuck are you looking at?”
You say, “Nothing.” And fade like the servant in a movie.
In the men’s room, there’s an unflushed turd in the commode and little flecks of white near the sink. Someone’s starting early.
Back in your office, you take measured breaths then methodically puncture the call list with a pen until a whole line of names and numbers has been obliterated.
Over lunch, you slip another memory card into the computer – pictures you took Friday, not many worth keeping. You were trying slow shutter speeds to make brushstrokes of passing cars, but all you got was blur. Still, there are a few, right at the beginning. A man sitting on the curb in front of Popeye’s holding a cigarette between two fingers, a dog looking back into a doorway, and a woman who had twirled out of the park next to the Catholic church as if she’d been breathed into the light, arms wide like a child at a dance recital. Ten shots of her – zip,zip,zip – until she curled into a waiting car.
Beth once asked, “Are you some kind of artist?” And you laughed, “It’s something to do.”
In high school you were nothing, except for the camera. The camera made you the Yearbook Guy, and because you were the Yearbook Guy, you could attend events and hang at the edge of groups that wouldn’t have tolerated you otherwise. Without it, you would have been less than nothing. Hard habit to give up, the lens that made you real.
Then you graduated and your parents divorced and you went to college, where it occurred to you that, like your mother, you wanted money, and like your father, you didn’t have any. That’s when you fell in love with Wall Street.

You were more than halfway when at night you roamed the mean streets near your apartment, the rhythm of your feet punctuated by the wash of passing cars, the Leica Monochrom hanging from a strap beneath your unzipped jacket: a small, plain‑looking camera, exclusively black-and-white.
Early on, people noticed. You were harassed by pimps and dealers, and brought to the curb by cops. Now, they wave as you pass. You’re the Camera Man. Even the homeless in their alleys and doorways think you’re one of them.
It’s back to the first batch and one shot: the steam of human breath from a dark doorway as if cold fire were burning in its shadows. Your one o’clock doesn’t show. You call people you’ve sold product to over the last couple of months – asking how they are, if they need help with anything. Sales 101: keep the fish on the hook. During a coffee break, you ask Beth how it’s going between her and the boyfriend. You don’t know what kind of car she drives or what music she prefers, but she’s told you a lot about her sex life. “He tried to borrow money from me,” she says.
“Uh-oh.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Someone comes in, a fat man in a beige overcoat that makes him look like a huge ball of twine. Beth rings Phyllis and sends him down the hall. About the boyfriend she says, “I fed him lobster and told him I’d found somebody else.”
“Who?”
“You.”
For once you are speechless, and she loves it.
“Do I get anything for backing you up?”
She stretches over the counter and kisses you on the cheek.
“Why lobster? That’s a lot of work for goodbye.”
Her eyes glitter over the tops of her glasses. “I like to hear them scream.”
The two o’clock doesn’t show either, and you pass the time researching markets you seldom play. At a minute after three, Beth rings you. “Showtime.”
An old couple looking for help. The man offers a hand gnarled like the burl of a tree; the woman is so pale she seems translucent. They’ve sold the farm, literally, and don’t know what to do with the money. Ten minutes later you could cut to the chase, but you listen, because for them it’s not about money, it’s about their lost dreams – a winding tale of good crops and bad, of kids who left home and friends who stayed too long, of the old man’s prostate and the woman’s heart. You ask questions to show you’re paying attention, then sell them your firm’s annuities and its unit trusts with their 2% management fee and 5% back-end load. They won’t make much money, but they won’t lose any either. No one said this was a charity.
As they leave, the woman says, “You’re such a smart boy.”
When they’re gone, Beth croons, “Smaaaart boy,” and this time you let her see the finger. “Oh, my!” she says.
You call the two appointments that didn’t show, and both tell you they have to think. Kiss of death.
Into your office comes Joyce, the ace Big – leopard-print dress and black heels – to congratulate you on the farmers. Apparently you’ve passed some kind of milestone. You tell her she’s a great boss, and all the angles of her face go cockeyed as she smiles. At one time she must have been beautiful, but now she looks as if she’s been whittled out of ice with a chain saw.
“We may be moving you up,” she says, and for encouragement she punctures your arm with her fingernails.
You go into your good dog routine.
When she leaves, you stew for a while, playing Goodgame Empire and losing your shirt. Then you call it a day. Beth looks shocked.
Up. When they hired you, that’s where you wanted to be. Now you’re not so sure. Up is where the bullshit starts. Do you really want to be Holloway’s bitch?
On the way home, you stop at an Asian market for chow fun and calamansi juice, and slum among the iced-over freezers offering fish eyes and oxtails. You buy a sack of shrimp-flavored chips with cheery lines of print like miniature mazes. Across the street, rent-a-cops shoo beggars from the drive-through at Popeye’s. You slip into the small park near the Catholic church. At its center a clogged fountain with walks arrayed like sunbeams around it. In the triangular plots of grass, the homeless sleep. They’re never a problem. You won’t give money, just food, and they’re not into food.
It’s early for the trade to be out, but a couple of street girls weave between the Callery pears the city has planted along the sidewalks to beautify the place. These too you have photographed. At night when the streetlamps bleach their faces and they look like movie zombies fighting the air. By day you’d think they were tweens gone awkward with new height. Eventually, the pros will chase them away, but for now they weave, barely looking at the street, not really caring as long as they’re high. It’s almost mystical, that not caring.
But they’re not your kind. Your kind wear the grey skirts and jackets of business and hang out in bars of trendy restaurants, drinking daiquiris to forget the bedroom with the Mary Engelbreit posters on the wall. Depressing as a job fair, those bars, except that nobody goes to a job fair if they’re not hiring. Like you, those women want more than they can get, but if lightning doesn’t strike, sometimes they’ll settle for less.
As you walk the bike home you wave to the crowd outside the Burger King on the corner. It’s a designated safe haven, and cops come by on a regular basis to listen to the locals carp and to eat free food. It’s a yearlong community picnic. Street people and pros and old folks hanging on. They tease the staff and the cops and each other, and make over kids as if they were an endangered species, which around here they are.
Between your building and the next, one of the local eremites thumps his head against a padlocked gate, speaking in tongues.
At home, for something to do, you tinker with commodities futures. One of the Bigs, a guy named Ward, lost his shirt a while back doing that. He had silver on margin and when it trended up inexplicably, he got margin calls and couldn’t come up with the cash. So he sold at a loss, and then the market, at the last minute, settled back where it had been before the spike.
You got to noticing, as your mom used to say. Lots of commodities futures trended way up or way down toward the end of a cycle, then calmed into comfortable territory – meaning lots of cashed out contracts for people willing to buy. Someone must be gaming the system. You called a friend from college, who does algorithms for pension funds. You asked him, “Who picks those up?”
And he said, “Who knows they’ll be out there?”
“The people who force the sale. But that’s illegal.”
He laughed. “Don’t try to game the gamers. They’ll eat you alive.”
Still, you play at it, like a pilot fish following sharks. In a month you’ve made maybe $1500. Not bad, but not the kind of money you were hoping for.
By eleven you’re on the street with the camera. It rained while you were inside. Roads glow and trees glitter as if they’d been strung with Christmas lights.
You stumble over Eddie, soaking wet, lying three feet from the oversized box he sleeps in. Eddie who, months ago, when you passed him, said, “When it rains, the slugs come out,” and you made the mistake of telling Beth.
“How come you’re not in your box, Eddie?”
He shakes his head mournfully. “Lost my keys.”
“Want me to help you in?”
“Rather jump off a bridge with a knife up my ass,” he giggles. Then he puts his head back on his arm.
There’s a lot to like about these people.
Outside the park, a deal is going down. Buyers come and go on this street, but the dealers, they might as well carry business cards. Everyone knows, including the police. The seller has his back to you, the buyer in profile. Nearby, a woman who looks like the one who danced to the car kicks at the curb. Normally, you keep your camera hidden when buys go down, but this is too good. The spacing is perfect, the backdrop is perfect, and the buyer is looking at his money as if it had turned into newspaper, so you take a few shots. Then he shouts at the woman and she turns around, and you take a few more. That’s when he sees you.
No good running. There’s nothing behind you but empty streets. You step into the roadway, and he gets right to the point. “I could cut you in half.”
“You and everybody else.”
“Give me the card.”
There are nearly two hundred photos on that card, but you hand it over.
When he tries to grab the camera, you back farther into the road. Not much traffic, but what there is you’re blocking. “It’s old, it’s cheap, and I’ve scratched my name on the metal.” You wave it at him. $4000 it cost you.
Someone honks. Someone shouts that he’s calling the police. You pull a twenty from your billfold and show him it’s empty. Your real wallet, with the credit cards, is at home, but there’s a hundred in your shoe.
He makes another grab.
“It only takes black and white.”
That stops him cold. “Bullshit.”
“Truth.”
He snatches the twenty out of your fingers. “What you want that shit for?”
A driver shouts that he’s called the police, so the guy leaves and you hoof it to Burger King, where two pros pelt you with jeers.
“Hey there, tough guy.”
The one in hot pants and a halter says, “Good thing you didn’t run. He’d of sliced you like a melon.”
Whores don’t like your hobby either.
The shift manager hands you a cup of coffee. “On the house.”
“He ran track in high school,” she adds, folding her arms under the fluorescent pink of her bra. “God, he was beautiful.”
A few minutes later, the cops show up, and you give a detailed description. They don’t even bother to write it down.
At home you throw up the coffee and the chow fun and God knows what else, and for a while you sit on the edge of the tub weeping.
Next morning, when you drag in late, Phyllis calls you into her office, her face solemn. The angry guy from yesterday called. He said you were rude. You try to explain, and for a while she lets you, then she holds up a hand and laughs. “Don’t worry, he went off on me too.” She offers to let you sit in on her meetings.
You can barely manage a smile.
Her office looks like a Marine command center: two screens running quotes, one for stocks, the other for commodities, a TV set to a business channel, plus her personal computer and a laptop you have to lift from the chair when you sit. All of it tells you one thing – she’s full of shit. Nobody here does real-time trading.
You listen in on her calls. The market spiked at the beginning of the month and now it’s tumbling. Her clients are scared; some want to bail. She talks them from the ledge and adjusts their portfolios a bit, and from fulsomeness of their gratitude you’d think she’d dragged them out of a fire. No one asks how much she makes on every prudent trade.
At one o’clock, Joyce and Rowsey, whose clients are mostly doctors, take you to lunch at a Thai restaurant, where they brag about how much hot oil they put on their food. Rowsey makes a thousand dollar suit look like it came off the rack at Kohl’s, but they’ve been sleeping together for years and, talking to you, they are really talking to each other.
After her third martini, Joyce leans forward till her chin is almost in her pad thai. “Never get cynical about money. Never. It’s a living thing, like a child, like a lover. You use it, it uses you, but you have to respect it.” She’s almost teary.
Rowsey winks. “The trick is not to get married.”
Joyce calls him a bastard, and they hold hands for a while. The Buddha in a frame on the wall laughs. You feel like you are back on the tub staring into the toilet.
It’s Rowsey who gives you the ground rules. At first you clear each trade with them. Stocks are okay, bonds are okay – options and commodities are not. Ditto real estate, unless it’s packaged in a fund. “After a while, we cut the strings,” he says. “You’ll be one of us.”
You want to say, “I’d rather jump off a bridge with a knife up my ass.”
But poverty scares you, and this won’t be hard to slip into. More work at first, maybe less money, but the money will come and the work will get easier, unless you take on people like Holloway. Maybe you can get Beth to close your door and stay. Hell of a life, if that’s all you aspire to.
Over the weekend, you hit the streets, but the pictures are shit. Joyce might have taken them. Here’s a homeless man. Cute.
Then the woman appears, the one who danced into the car. Only she’s not dancing, she’s doing complicated things with her hands. It looks like rapture, but it’s probably meth. You make sure she’s alone then take a few shots, and the previews astonish you. They look mysterious, in focus or out, as if she were removing wraps and then shrouding herself again. You have no idea how that happened. The black-and-white turns her frail blouse into fire and the scarf into smoke. Her body, beneath the skirt, glows like onyx.
Passing cars add their vagrant light. Maybe she didn’t see you at first, but now she wanders over, balancing on the curb, and slaps the stop sign with the flat of her hand. “What’s up?”
She could be fifteen or fifty. Like a cheap holograph, she shifts back and forth. You try a shot of the broken glass of an abandoned storefront. Most of the time, if you point at something else, they go away, but she follows murmuring, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee.” Then she’s looking over your shoulder, her hands lightly on your arms and cold as ice.
“Show me me,” she says. A high voice, breathy and without vibrato, like a child’s.
So you show her.
She makes you go back and do it again, then she says, “I’m hungry.”
So you buy her dinner at Burger King. The place is almost empty. She picks at her hair till the food comes. A call on her cell – the cheap kind the welfare people hand out. She looks at the number and lets it go.
She doesn’t touch her food. She watches you eat, legs crossed, one foot dancing atop the other, and poaches your onion rings the way girls used to do back in high school. “My boyfriend doesn’t give me any money,” she says.
You unwrap her burger for her, and she seems surprised it’s there. She gnaws away, the sandwich held delicately on her fingertips. “It’s my money,” she says. “I earned it.” Like a bird she hardly chews, just bites and swallows. “He gets wasted and comes back for more, and what the hell am I, a fuck factory?” She points to a big bruise on her slim and surprisingly muscular thigh. “Maybe I need to go to a doctor.”
You tell her that might be a good idea.
“Why do you do it?” She points at the camera.
“So I can sleep.”
She smiles and touches your arm. “For fifty, I could make you happy.”
“Not a chance.”
She points at the camera again, and you say, “Not my style.”
“What is your style?”
So you show her the ones she hasn’t seen. She cocks her head to one side and squeezes your hand when she wants you to pause. Eating has calmed her. “It’s better this way,” she says, meaning the black-and-white. “You can feel things more.”
As you leave the restaurant together, she gets another call on the welfare phone. “I know,” she says. “I know. I’m good for it.” And then, “Fuck you!”
As you head toward your apartment, and without saying a word, she follows right along. She takes your arm to cross the street, and that’s when you know what she has known all along.
But not at your place – you’re not that dumb. There’s a motel down the way. As you pay for the room, she tries to shake a ball of gum from a transparent globe on a stand. The woman behind the counter says, “You got to put money in.”
She looks at the number on the key and takes the metal steps to the second floor. You follow, looking at the black thong teased above the elastic of her skirt. You ask her name.
She looks over her shoulder. “Really? Names?”
It’s an old-fashioned key on a diamond-shaped plastic holder with the room number on it, but the lock is so loose you could have opened the door with a coat hanger. A crack in the corner of the window has been sealed with duct tape. It’s hot inside, but she shivers. You turn on a light and she turns it off, and in the orange glow from the neon outside she sheds her clothes as if she were scratching off strips of dead skin. Then she sits on the toilet and pees, her head in her hands, a shadow in a closet of shadows. “Put it on the dresser,” she says, meaning the money. You take off your shoes and put down the hundred, then add the twenty you keep for show. She turns on the shower and steps in.
A picture on the wall, a lamp on the nightstand, a nondescript chair by the door. The little bar of soap hits the floor, and she bumps around trying to find it. You close the window curtain, leaving a gap so she can find her way back.
Soon out she comes, hair in a towel, spectral in the orange light, breasts large for her shrunken body. She drops the money into the puddle her jeans make on the floor and towels her hair. It’s a body of odd angles like a lottery ticket wadded up but then kept, as if it might have some value after all. In the photographs, she is beautiful, but here you’re glad she’s not.
“It’s free,” she says, watching you watching, “but shut the curtain.”
Now there’s only a tiny blade of light where the curtains fail to meet. You want to hold her, naked like that, with the towel and everything, but she stumbles into bed by a way that somehow circumvents you, and there’s nothing to do but remove your clothes and follow.
“I don’t have a condom,” you say.
In that little blade of light, her eyes widen. “Good luck.”
The manic foot taps your leg as you slip between the covers, then it calms, and her eyes settle on the ceiling. As your bodies warm, your fingers explore her – breasts and belly and thighs, anywhere you’re not tracing bone. Her hands grip the steel rod of the metal headboard then relax and lightly stroke your hair. When your body responds, she smiles as if that were a great joke, and when you slip between her legs, the bed responding to your weight as if giving way to make things easier, she bites her lower lip, and cold fingers tick your back like snowfall.
In spite of everything, it feels good, as if you’re on the way to some place you really want to be. It pisses you off when you come. “Bitch,” you say, “Bitch!” and drive yourself into her.
“It’s okay,” she says, “it’s okay,” like she’s soothing a child.
As your breath subsides, she shelters her cold hands between your bodies, and you lie that way for a while. Then you guide them down. “Okay,” she says. It takes a while, but she knows what she’s doing, and you get another chance. “That’s better,” she says.
The two of you fall apart like a book with a broken spine, and both stare at the light flickering above the curtain rod. “Take me home,” she says. “I can’t stand this much longer.”
You feel sorry for her, but not that sorry.
She unfolds herself from the bed and forages for her clothing. “Shit,” she says, “shit,” and turns on a light. You watch the awkward poses as she dresses. She points toward the camera, “What are you going to do with me?”
“Nothing,” you say. “Maybe put it on a wall.”
“It!” She pats the pockets of your jeans before she throws them at you. She looks, looks again, grabs the money off the floor and turns contrite.
“Sorry. I like you. We could . . . this could be a regular thing. I don’t have to know where you live.”
You don’t answer.
When she’s gone, you make a quick inventory, but the camera was all you had, and it’s right there on the nightstand. Lying back, you wonder what possessed you. Then you wonder what she’s going to tell the guy she calls her boyfriend. Maybe she’s given you something, but probably nothing you can’t get rid of. Ditto her. Your little fellows wending their way up the muddy river of her body.
Nothing has been resolved, nothing changed, but you’re happy. Like you’ve arrived at some great conclusion, but the only conclusion you’ve arrived at is that you don’t give a shit. Maybe that should be your mantra: ”I don’t give a shit.”
Before you go, you take a few shots of the bed and in the process pluck from the floor a bit of plastic, a corner cut off a sandwich bag. You take it as a souvenir.
It’s raining, and the streets are chiaroscuro, but right now you don’t care about that, either. You remember her face when you called her a bitch – as if you were a book she was reading. You remember her as she entered the room with a towel on her head, and wish there were a setting slow enough to catch that moment with the shadows still clinging to her like a wake of black water.

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Richard Spilman is the author of two collections of short stories: Hot Fudge (Poseidon Press, 1990), and The Estate Sale (Texas Review Press, 2011).