Closing paragraphs

A while back I gave examples of the opening paragraphs of stories that still worked for me (go here). Here are the closing paragraphs of those same stories, in order.

• After the dance I concentrate on drinking. For a change I feel like getting smashed. Although I drink constantly, I am seldom drunk. I stick to beer on the rocks and a sipping pace. I feel a constant glow, usually euphoric but tonight dismal, depressing, dreadful for some reason. One of my occasional philosophical moments, I decide. Another beer and I'll be spouting epigrams. The gang will laugh and jokingly call me The Professor. I don't mind — I have a sense of humor and can laugh even at myself. I'm over thirty, so you can't call me arrogant. My dad, in fact, would take a belt to me at the slightest hint of arrogance; he beat it out of me early, I tell you. He was a good fellow, too, though with his faults. So who's perfect? But he taught me responsibility and proper humility. Will Jim ever learn the same? I hope to Christ he does. I can't understand today's kids. How do you communicate with them? If you're over thirty, they clam up or suspect you. They’re spoiled, is the thing. They have whatever they want. They know nothing about suffering, struggling, striving. They are spoiled. The nouveaux riches.
  
  I spin to the pool table. Betty is leaning forward, leaning toward me for a shot, and the position swells up her blouse. My stare is interrupted when the authentic young blonde passes by on her way to the restroom. Her perfume stays behind her, caressing me like skin.
  
  A chorus of greeting rises, "Mary, Mary." Slowly, I turn toward the doorway.
  

  
  

• "Got a match?"
  
  Roy made a noise of fear. He turned to face a black man half-again his size, who held a cigarette in his lips and repeated, "Got a match?"
  
  Roy fumbled for his lighter and muttered, "Sure, of course." He knew that his hand would tremble if he tried to light the man's cigarette himself, so he simply handed him the lighter. He read sarcasm in the reply, "Thanks." The black man's countenance was menacing. Roy should have done it himself.
  
  The bus pulled to the curb as the man inhaled, and Roy maneuvered past him and rushed to the bus's opening door. The women beat him. They were fat and moved too slowly, and Roy waited for them to climb up the steps; waited.
  
  "Here, I don't want your lighter."
  
  "Oh." Roy took the lighter, put it in his pocket and turned back to the bus as the man strode away. He swallowed once, twice, waiting for the women to climb aboard.
  
  When finally there was room in the doorway, he stepped up and in a moment of relief his gaze fixed upon the driver's silver badge, the metallic star that would guide him home.
  
  Then Roy paid his fare and went to the back of the bus.
  

  
  

• THE MORNING NEWSPAPER explained that the two men merely had wanted to shake Elvis' hand. They were unarmed and a little drunk and intended to shake hands on a bet. Elvis wasn't pressing charges, so the police let the men go.
  
  Getting into the car after breakfast, Lester asked Mary if she believed that's all the men wanted to do.
  
  "I think so. Why?"
  
  "Because it would've been easy if they'd wanted to shoot him."
  
  "What kind of hypothetical situation is that?"
  
  "It's not so hypothetical."
  
  "Who would want to shoot Elvis in the first place?"
  
  "Lots of people."
  
  As the car idled, Lester looked for something to play on the tape deck.
  
  "Who?" Mary wanted to know.
  
  "Jealous husbands."
  
  "Oh God, Les, you're not going to tell me you were jealous last night."
  
  "Because you turned into a thirty-two-year-old teenager? Not me, baby."
  
  "You're being stupid. Nobody wants to shoot Elvis."
  
  "It would be easy to do. I had a gun in there, didn't I? Who would've stopped me?"
  
  "I don't want to talk about it."
  
  He put on a tape of old rhythm-n-blues songs and turned the car toward Los Angeles. He sped across the desert at ninety miles an hour, listening to his music as Mary slept, and Elvis was not mentioned again until they were home and Krista ran to him for her pitchur.
  

  
  

• "Maybe we can talk about your moving in with me," she says. "I have a one bedroom."
  
  I say, "Maybe we can go there tonight."
  
  She squeezes my hand, lets it go and smiles.
  
  "Not tonight. I don't want us to get back together for the wrong reasons. I love you, Raymond. I want us to work. I want us to sit down soon and talk about the things that went wrong. And why."
  
  "I was hoping you were ..." I finish the sentence by raising my eyebrows in the way that once was a signal between us.
  
  "I am, Raymond, believe me." She stands up. "I don't know what you're going to do about it, but I know what I'm going to do about it."
  
  She comes around the table, bends down and kisses me on the lips.
  
  "I'll call you tomorrow morning, okay?" she says.
  
  "I'd like that."
  
  "Oh, Raymond."
  
  I don't even close down the bar. Even with money in my pocket I don't buy a new can of Raid. Something has changed. I'm hearing riffs again. I celebrate by taking a cab, not the bus, to a hotel and renting a room. By the time a lone cockroach crawls out from the bathroom plumbing, the room is dark and I'm enjoying the soundest sleep I've had in months.
  

  
  

• Not even the Wallowa County Who-Who survived the disappearance of the owls. The Fishtrap Boys somehow never got around to writing a song for the dance, and Chief Joseph Days came and went without anyone dancing the new two-step. Near the end of the summer, Rosie even stopped asking Fletch to come home with her.
  
  One afternoon in September, Fletch and Renford were in The Cowboy Bar reminiscing about the magical night they created a new dance.
  
  “Hell of a two-step,” said Fletch.
  
  “The loggers sure loved it,” said Renford.
  
  Charley, the bartender, said, “Heard on the radio that them spotted owls have been seen up near Glacier Park.”
  
  Fletch and Renford were silent.
  
  “Montana,” said Charley.
  
  Fletch shook his head and sipped his beer. “The Greenhouse Effect,” he said.
  
  Charley said, “I never believed they was endangered ‘til they started acting so crazy. Something must be wrong with them.”
  
  “I’ll tell you what an endangered species is,” said Fletch. “It’s us. Logging.”
  
  “We belong in a zoo,” mumbled Renford.
  
  “Except who would come? Who the hell cares about a logger?,” Fletch asked the empty bar.
  
  There was a long silence. Fletch had planned it this way. He knew Charley couldn’t stand long silences and, sure enough, before another word was spoken, Charley did just what Fletch had figured he would do.
  
  “What the hell,” said Charley, and he bought the next round.
  

  
  

• Is gloom a consequence of power, the power I have at the precise moment I hold their collective attention? Their faces are more alert than mine for the weary hour. Even where the class's countenance is fatigued, it is expectant enough to reveal the waiting, the waiting for me to begin. And what, in God's name, do they expect me to say?
  
  There is an irony in this question--one of your cherished absurdities--that brings a smile to my lips. Immediately the class breathes more easily. In my hesitation to begin, they had read an unannounced quiz and now they know they are safe. I glance outside through the window, to the lawn crossed with lengthening shadows. With what acceleration does that shadow creep across the lawn? A problem to put away for later, I note. Nothing so serious now. The mood of the hour, born in the class's visible sigh of relief, no quiz, is too relaxed to violate with talk of physical phenomena. I must work them into it. And so I ask, "Who's going to win the game this week?" to which the reply is unanimous, "We are" Then for as long as I am able, I ride with them, letting them carry me through the seconds of this closing hour even as they approach their own destinies, which will take them so far from where they sit today. I tell a joke and they laugh, laugh heartily, and their gaiety soothes me. There will be time later to talk about physics. We'll need to soon enough, for I'll have walked into the spider web again, that web of gloom, and while in it I will ask myself what it is that I am doing there, standing up before their young minds and young bodies; what is it that I am expected to do?
  
  The inquiry will be brief. With a shrug I'll step to the blackboard, draw a trajectory, begin an equation and hear behind me the scratching sound of pens on paper. At which time, in the words you prefer, the lesson begins.