Three Tally Stories

1. The Count at the Door

When the band put down its instruments on the last Saturday in February, a woman came out of the hall with her shoes in her hand and stopped at the screen by the door. Rosa Almeida took the woman's coat from the rail and held it while she pressed like. The upper number rose by one. The woman's husband came behind her, read the small print under the numbers, and pressed dislike. The lower number rose by one.

"He dances to complain," the woman said.

"He comes back," Rosa said.

They went out to Water Street together.

The screen had been by the door of the Marigold longer than the glass in the ticket window. It showed two numbers, likes above and dislikes below. Underneath, in small print, it said: Say what you thought of the place. The count had been running eleven years, the whole of Rosa's keeping of the hall. She could read a night's dancing in the margin before she read it in the till.

The Marigold stood on Water Street in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, built in 1928 by a lodge that had wanted a floor sprung for dancing and a ceiling worth looking up at during the slow numbers. Rosa's father had painted the ceiling in 1961, gold leaf on plaster fruit, and had been paid partly in dance lessons, which was how he met her mother. Rosa kept the hall's books, hired the bands, swept the floor herself on Sunday mornings, and held the deed in the office safe, signed over by the lodge when its last three members were too old to climb the stairs to argue about it.

The offer from Merrow Production arrived in March, printed on heavy paper. Merrow made synthetic acts for two of the large catalogs and needed a building with height. The letter praised the hall's bones and proposed to keep the facade, the marquee, and the lobby, and to pour a new floor inside the shell for the render machines. What Merrow wanted from Rosa, before the planning commission heard the matter in June, was a quiet spring. She read the letter twice and put it in the safe with the deed, and she did not call the number on it.

The count that spring became a local habit of speech. The screen's numbers were on the hall's page, and people in Cape Girardeau opened it the way they opened the river gauge in flood years. Dancers voted at the door. Their parents, who had danced there in the seventies, voted from the QR plate by the ticket window when they came to collect grandchildren from lessons. A man who had been thrown out in 1998 for fighting voted dislike every Sunday from his porch, with the regularity of a man watering a plant, and Rosa, who checked the count on Monday mornings while the coffee went through, allowed for him the way she allowed for weather. By May the likes stood at 4,812 and the dislikes at 391, and a reporter from the county paper drove down to ask Rosa what the numbers meant.

"They mean people press the buttons," Rosa said.

"Would you say the town has spoken?"

"The town has pressed the buttons," Rosa said. "If it wants to speak, there is a hearing in June."

At the hearing in June, the commission's aide read the count into the record because a council member asked him to, and he read it and then said, for the same record, that the tally had no standing in the proceeding and bound nothing and no one. Merrow's lawyer spoke about height and jobs. A woman who taught the Tuesday lessons spoke about her students. Rosa spoke last, because the chair had kept her for last in the belief that she would close the matter down, and she said the hall had been a business for ninety-eight years and was one still, and that she had come to sell or not sell, and the commission could not do that part for her either way. The commission tabled the demolition permit until September.

In August, Merrow's lawyer brought the purchase agreement to Rosa's office and laid it on the desk. Rosa opened the safe and set Merrow's March letter and the deed beside it. The price typed on the first page of the agreement was the price she had written in pencil on the back of the letter in March, because the count had made the building famous and raised the value of keeping its face.

Rosa read the agreement through once. The facade stayed. The marquee and the lobby stayed. The new floor went in for the render machines. She turned two pages and found no ceiling and no screen.

"The ceiling is not in here," she said.

"It is inside the shell," the lawyer said.

"It needs to be named," Rosa said. "So does the screen."

She took her pencil and wrote in the margin of the second page. The marquee stays lit. The ceiling stays, with the render floor poured beneath it and a glass panel at the lobby's center where anyone can stand and look up at the fruit. The screen stays by the door, on the same page.

"The page can move to the new site," the lawyer said.

"My nephew keeps the accounts. He says a new page starts the numbers over. The numbers are the building's. They go on being the building's."

The lawyer read what she had written. He used the office telephone, spoke for less than a minute, and came back to the desk with his pen out. He initialed each of the three lines in the margin. Then Rosa signed her name at the foot of the last page and slid the deed across the desk.

The last dance was held on the final Saturday of August. The band played past its contract because the floor was full and nobody with a horn in his hands wanted to be the man who stopped it. Rosa danced once, with the mayor, who stepped carefully and apologized in advance and then did not need to. At the end of the night she stood by the door with the coats, and on her way out, last as she had been for eleven years of nights, she pressed like, for the hall that had been, and the number went up by one and stayed there, steady as a held note.

By October the lobby held a cafe where the ticket window had been, and sponsors of synthetic acts took their meetings under the ceiling, and the screen by the door went on counting. People photographed the marquee and voted from the sidewalk. A touring act's sponsor cited the count in a trade paper as evidence of the building's warmth. The numbers belonged to the page, and the likes climbed for the lobby exactly as they had climbed for the dances, 5,204 by the new year, 5,311 by spring. Rosa managed the building for Merrow now, at a salary, with the keys on the same ring. Some evenings, locking up, she stood a moment under her father's ceiling in the empty lobby and read the count beside the door: 5,311 likes.

2. The Rail Count

At the spring meet, Tomás led Kestrel back along the rail path after the sixth race, her coat dark with sweat and the lead shank loose in his hand. The home-stretch screen showed her page. Beneath it sat two buttons, one for a like and one for a dislike. A girl in a yellow cap squeezed to the fence and pressed Like as the mare passed; the counter clicked from 192 to 193. A man behind her pressed Dislike.

The boy who kept the rail slate wiped the previous line clean and chalked the new line where Tomás could read it: Kestrel, 193 likes and 29 dislikes since the gates opened. Two rows up, a woman tapped Kestrel's page on her phone. Walking on the mare's other side, Della watched the page's dislike total climb by one before they reached the paddock gate.

The feed company's man waited beside his banner at the gate. He had asked Della for something the crowd could hold onto. Della took the announcer's microphone, set her hand on Kestrel's neck, and made the pledge: when the dislikes on Kestrel's page passed the likes, she would retire the mare. The crowd approved, and the feed company renewed for two seasons at a figure that paid the stable's winter feed bill and most of Tomás's wages.

Tomás Reyes had mucked Kestrel's stall for four years. He knew the mare the way a man knows a road he drives in the dark: the left hind that she favored after a wet track, the ear she laid back for strangers and never for him, the exact weight of her head when she set it on his shoulder at the wash rack, which she did when she was pleased with herself. He had never voted on her page. When Della asked him once why not, he said the page was for people who could not be there in the morning.

Kestrel was a six-year-old mare with a long stride and a closing run that made the rail crowd stand up in their seats. Her page had grown the way the pages of athletes grow, likes accumulating from the countries the simulcast reached, from people who had opinions about her bloodline, her trainer, her silks, and her chances, most of whom had never seen the mare in person. A boy in a port city on another continent voted dislike every night that season as an act of family loyalty. His grandfather had lost a month's wages on Kestrel's sire in a bad year and had cursed the line at the table for a decade, and the boy kept the curse the way other boys keep a saint's day, faithfully, without ever having seen a horse from the rail.

The surge came in the week of the Hartwell Stakes, Kestrel's last entry of the season. Between Monday's feeding and Tuesday's, the dislikes rose by eleven hundred. By Wednesday they rose by nine hundred more, and the count stood within two hundred of turning, and the track announcer, who read the page each morning because the sponsor's agreement asked him to mention it, began to read it each morning the way he read the barometer in the announcer's booth. Della walked the shedrow with her phone in her fist. She called the company that kept the page and reached a courteous young man who explained that the page counted what it counted. There was no audit to request. The votes had arrived from accounts opened that week in a pattern he could see as plainly as she could, and the page had no way to refuse them. He was sorry. He offered to note her concern in a field on the account that nothing read.

"He can see it," Della said to Tomás, in the stall, while Kestrel ate. "He can see it and the page can't."

"The page was built before anybody needed it to see," Tomás said.

On the morning of the race the dislikes passed the likes by three hundred and four votes, most of them cast within a single hour in the middle of the night, from a hemisphere where it had been afternoon. The feed company's man telephoned Della at the barn and used the word pledge four times. She told him she would speak to him after the race and put the phone in her pocket and stood with her forehead against the stall door for the length of one breath, and then she sent Tomás to look at the rail screens.

The track kept its own screens at the rail and the paddock, fed by the same page and showing the same totals, but the track also kept, by a habit older than the page, the count of the buttons under the rail screens themselves, the ones you had to stand at the fence to press. Tomás read both and came back through the shedrow at the pace of a man carrying water.

"The rail count is nine to one for her," he said. "Nine hundred likes, from people standing at the fence."

Della ran her. Kestrel broke clean, settled fourth, and came down the stretch in the long stride that made strangers stand, and won by a neck, and came back to the winner's circle breathing hard and sound, with her ears up, looking for the camera she had learned to look for. Della stood for the photograph with the feed company's banner behind her, and that evening, in the office above the barn, she set the two counts side by side, and neither one made the decision any easier. The remote count had been bought by men who wanted her retired into a cheap breeding lease before her price could rise on a Hartwell win. It would be talked about in the business by Friday, and no one would be able to prove any of it. The rail count was nine hundred people who had stood in the sun.

She retired the mare on the veterinarian's word a month later, when the left hind began to fill after gallops and the scans said what the scans said. She told the feed company the pledge had been badly made and she was withdrawing it as publicly as she had made it, because a count she could not audit would not retire her horse, and the company declined to renew, and the winter feed bill came back onto her own books, where it had lived before. Tomás kept his hours. Kestrel went to a farm two counties away, and within the hour she had rolled in the paddock, cropped the grass along the fence, and dozed standing in the sun with her ears loose, and Tomás drove down on his day off for the first month, and then on the first Sunday of each month, with carrots in a paper bag.

The next spring, the track's programs came back from the printer with a second line under the totals, added by the printer's son who had taken over the shop and who had been at the rail for the Hartwell. Rail count, the line said, and it gave the numbers from the buttons at the fence, likes and dislikes, for whoever wanted to know what the people who had shown up thought.

3. The Kept Count

The Harbor Rooms seated sixty and kept its own count, at a screen by the door, where Beata Lindqvist stood on concert nights with the coat hooks at her elbow.

A woman came in who had not been before, her coat over her arm, and stopped at the screen because the people ahead of her had stopped there. "You vote when you come in, if you want to," Beata said, and took the coat from her. "Like, dislike, or you leave it blank. On your way out you can change it once, and the changed vote is the one we keep." The woman touched the screen, chose, and went in, and Beata had the coat on its hook in about the time the explanation had taken. A man with gray at the temples, coming in behind her, said, "I voted last winter. Does mine still stand?" "It faded in the spring," Beata said. "A kept vote lasts a year. Cast it again tonight and it keeps." He nodded and cast it again. Beata Lindqvist had kept the count for nine years, the first four in a book with a cloth spine and since then on the room's own page, and she kept her station by the door.

Anselm Rye had sung in the Harbor Rooms in the seventies, when the room was a coffee house with a liquor problem, and he had sung everywhere since, in halls with his name in the program's first line and then, in the long middle of his career, in halls where it appeared in smaller type. He had a sludge rating, the spectrum's mark for a bought campaign, in his past, from a campaign a label had bought in his name in the years when he no longer asked what was bought in his name, and the venues priced him at the careful middle. His final concert was announced for the last Saturday of October, one night, unamplified, sixty seats, the room he had started in. The seats sold in a day. The wild count for the event turned hostile in the week before, after a clip went around of Rye, forty years younger, walking off a festival stage rather than sing an encore for a crowd that had talked through his set. The dislikes climbed on the open page at the pace of a story being passed hand to hand, and by Friday the count stood against him, three to two, most of the votes cast by people whose names the room had never heard because the room had never been meant to hear them.

Beata watched it the way she watched all wild weather, from inside. The door screen would tell its own story. On Saturday she set the book by the door out of habit, under the screen, with the pencil the room provided, and she wrote the date at the top of a fresh page though the screen had kept the count for five years and the book was a courtesy now, a thing the room did because it had always done it.

They voted coming in, sixty people in a line that moved slowly because the screen took a moment with each of them, and the room scored the evening before a note was sung, the kept count at the doors standing at forty-one likes and nine dislikes, with ten abstaining, and Beata entered all three numbers without comment. Rye came out in a dark suit with no introduction and sang for an hour and a half, standing at the room's center with his hands at his sides, in a voice that had lost its top. He sang the old songs in the new keys. Twice, in the second half, the room went quiet. Once, during the song about the ferry, the woman beside Beata's station at the door took her husband's hand without looking for it.

In the interval the sponsor's man found Beata by the coats. The sponsor, a beverage company with a fondness for final occasions, had paid for the evening's filming and for the series that was to follow it, three more farewells by three more singers. He had a proposal he described as display work. The venue's screen, he said, showed the kept count only, and the kept count was a small room's opinion, and he wanted the wild count merged onto the display for the second half, both numbers side by side, context for the film's audience. He named a consulting fee that equaled Beata's wages for the season. He said the wild count was information and the room was hiding it.

Beata told him the room's screen showed the room's count, and the wild count was on every phone in every pocket in the building for anyone who wanted it, and he was welcome to hold his up. He said the series depended on the film and the film depended on the evening reading as an event in the world and not a club's valentine. She said she kept the count, and she did not rent it out. He said he would speak to the owner, and she said the owner would tell him the same thing in a longer sentence, which the owner did, on Monday, after the series had been withdrawn and the room's winter bookings had thinned to the bone. Beata's hours were cut in November, as the owner's wife had warned her they would be, kindly, at the kitchen table. She kept the count on the reduced hours. Some things the room did because it had always done them, and her job had narrowed to those things.

The vote going out took longer than the vote coming in. People changed their minds at the screen with the unhurried care of people signing something in a foreign language. The display board's network failed at twenty past ten, as it did whenever the kitchen ran both ovens, and Beata opened the book and kept the count by hand for the last half hour, calling out nothing, writing the changes as they came: two dislikes struck through and entered again as likes, one like withdrawn to an abstention by a young man who said, to no one in particular, that he wanted to think about it some more first, which the room's rules allowed and the book recorded in his own words in the margin, because Beata had always kept the margins for remarks. The final kept count stood forty-eight likes, four dislikes, eight abstentions and remarks. The morning papers printed the wild count, which by then ran against Rye by four thousand votes, and one of them described the evening as a defiant gesture by a dwindling audience, and a man who had sat in the fourth row wrote a letter to that paper saying he had been there and the room had stood at the end for a full minute before anyone applauded, which was not in the count and could not be entered in it, and the paper printed the letter on Thursday.

Beata kept the letter. On her last shift of November she copied the night's kept count into the book's permanent pages in her good hand, the forty-eight and the four and the eight, and the young man's remark in the margin exactly as he had said it, and she put the letter in the envelope pocket inside the back cover. Then she shut the book and hung her coat on the hook by the door, under the dark screen, and went home.