A senior operations manager for an international financial services firm, Jeff Shearer returned to his English-major roots last year when he took a creative writing class from Richard Speight at Belmont University. With this award, the Spokane native is adding to a new family tradition: Two of Shearer’s four daughters—Morgan, 9, and Brennan, 12—recently won writing honors of their own.

Fiction judge Marc Smirnoff writes: “And now for something completely different: a topsy-turvy portrait of obsession and macho-man posturing.”

Loyalty. Let me give you a definition of loyalty. They nailed John Gotti on tape saying, “Gonna be a Cosa Nostra till I die. Be it an hour from now or be it tonight, or a hundred years from now when I’m in jail, I’m gonna be a Cosa Nostra.” No maybe, baby. He laid it on the line. I’ve heard the tape. Well, let me tell you, an hour from now, a hundred years from now, I’m gonna be a Saintly Devil. Till I die. Write it down, I’ll sign it in blood. You wash dishes all day like me and after ten hours of bubble dancing you gotta get some relief. Saintly Devils, they saved me. Weren’t for them, I would’ve been back in the big house a long time ago, suckin’ up to the man, day dreaming about night dreams. Saintly Devil till I die.

But the Saintly Devils have a crisis. In my book, if it’s a matter of principle, that’s a pre-qualified crisis. And if this is not a test of principles, then take me out and shoot me. Everyone’s got a base point, right? Trust me, we got a crisis on our hands.

Last Saturday was bad berries for the Saintly Devils. Bad berries. It was elimination night at the Square Hole. We were having a cream Cadillac kind of night. It was ace. Everyone was hitting the mark. Spot-on, as Kyle would say. Kyle, he’s my stickman. Tucker and Lenny, they’re all right. But Kyle, he’d lay the whole bundle down for me. I’d do the same for him. Neither one of us ever had to say it, though. That’s how it is with your stickman. If you have to say it, you just took ten points off it being true. Never mind that. Like I said, it was a Cadillac night—until the Red Barons showed up.

The Saintly Devils take pride in extending a hand to the competition. It elevates you—hike the high road and all that. So we’re all checking out the Red Barons as they come in, and they’re looking around, getting their bearings, checkin’ us out. We understood. Gotta get the lay of the land. We would’ve done the same if we were in someone else’s domain.

Kyle says, “I’m gonna make introductions.” Kyle’s not the shy type. He’d shake hands with a cactus. So we all follow him over.

Kyle picks out the Red Baron with his arms crossed. You can tell he’s the lead man—trying hard to look disenchanted like James Dean himself, while the rest of them are all playing mental mumbly-peg, pointing around and comparing notes. Kyle says, “Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. I’m Kyle, and these are the Saintly Devils.” The guy looks at Kyle’s stuck-out hand but doesn’t reciprocate. He doesn’t even look Kyle in the eye. He just stands there with his head cocked one way and his hat cocked the other. We waited for Kyle to say something else, getting kind of embarrassed that he keeps his hand out there with Mr. Stoneface not even uncrossing his arms. The other Red Barons are watching this with prime-rate interest.

Finally the guy points a finger at Kyle. “That vest.”

“What about it?” Kyle asks.

The guy turns to the other Red Barons. “You ever see such an ugly vest?” Then he turns to Kyle. “I wouldn’t wear that vest to a dog fight.” The Red Barons think that’s real funny.

Now, I know that Kyle takes pride in what he wears, and this is Kyle’s favorite vest. So before anything starts, I get right in the guy’s face. “Don’t I know your mother?” I say. The Saintly Devils laugh, and Kyle’s off the hook. The guy gets red and gives me that icy little stare of his. It’s a ruse. Doing time will teach you to read a bullshit stare. This guy’s all bullshit, and that’s what I tell Kyle as I pull him away.

Of course, Kyle doesn’t want to leave his pride challenged, so at first he doesn’t budge. I tell him, “He ain’t worth it, Kyle. You wanna mess up your boots walking in that guy’s bullshit?”

That’s when Kyle finally breaks away. “Yeah, Shakey, you’re right. Let the dogs have what the dogs bring in.”

Now if that had been the end of it, we could’ve gone back to having our ace night out. Things once again would have been copacetic. But that wasn’t the end of it. In fact, it was like that little ping you hear when an uphill engine starts to lose its timing—you know that you’ve got a radiator in a slow climb to boiling over.

For the rest of the night, all you heard about was the Red Barons. “Look at those Red Barons. They’re capital-S sharp!” Or, “Check out those Barons. They’re bad—they’ve got the moves.” On any other night, that would’ve been the Saintly Devils they were talking about.

The break point was in the last round. We were psyched. It was our chance at redemption. We huddled up. We’re the Saintly Devils. Hell, we invented style. You can’t clone what we got. We were pumped.

We knew what we had to do. Focus—that’s the name of the game. The second the tape hit the first measure of “Bad Dog’s Lament,” we were right on top of every call. When the caller cried Shuffle the Deck, we had it shuffled. When he called Walk the Plank, damn if we didn’t walk the most perfect plank you ever saw. Tag the Star, Spin Chain and Circulate In, Clover the Wave. All the hard ones, one after another. Trim the Web, Wrap the Bacon. Bam, bam, bam. We kept one eye on the other groups—not an easy task when you’re passing the axle. The SpinOuts broke first. The pressure was too much.

Chase Your Neighbor, Check Over and Back, Butterfly Through and Shake the Shack.Two more groups fell out. The temperature went up ten degrees. We were so sweaty it was hard to keep a grip for Whip the Doggies and Jaywalk home. That eliminated the Shooting Stars. Now it was just us and the Red Barons.

The whole room tightened in on us, like someone tugging on a noose. The caller stepped up the pace. It was one impossible combination after another. Phantom Formation, Don’t be Late, All Eight Recycle, Now Percolate. The Red Barons were hot. They didn’t miss a step. We were going head to head, and we would’ve aced them, except Kyle and Shirl missed a handoff on Swing Around the Ring. We broke. It was too late to square up. We were two calls back. We knew it was over. No one had to tell us. And the Red Barons, they were over there smiling those Kool-Aid grins. Like a bunch of dancing mannequins. Let me tell you, there’s nothing compared to being laughed at by a Bunny Bread mannequin.

That night was like losing a home game to a team no one’s even heard of. Makes for a slow, heads down trip to the locker room. Capital D-jected. We gathered up our gear and left for the Fool’s Rush Inn to lick our wounds.

You never saw a sorrier bunch of whipped puppies. Even the bartender left us alone. Finally I’d had enough. “This ain’t your fault,” I said. “Look at me. Don’t go and get mopey-dopey. We’re a team. A V-8 engine. We just gotta get the timing fixed, right?”

They shrugged.

“Am I right? Have the Saintly Devils ever quit? Hell no. This isn’t Lawrence Welk. This is the real thing. The Red Barons? They ain’t nothing but a swackin’ sewing machine. Nothing more.”

They nodded. “Spot on, Shakey,” Kyle said.

Tucker raised his beer bottle like he was making a toast. “A team, just like you said, Shakey.”

We all took a long, cool drink. Then, in unison, Kyle and I thumbed our bottles, gave them a shake, and started spraying the others. You just gotta know when the air’s getting too thick.

Driving home, I knew I’d never get to sleep. I was too wound up, and the Red Barons were banging around my head worse than a caffeine high. I swung over to Oldtown to check out the potential. It was old habits kickin’ in, but I told myself I was just looking.

Sure enough, a Stop ’N Go was open and waiting, with a grayhair minding the store. Other than him, the place was empty. I pulled my shirttail out and stuck my Colt Python down the back of my pants. The adrenaline was on fast drip.

I strolled in and headed for the freezer section. The old man looked up and grunted. Easy hundred in the cash register, I told myself, staring at the frozen pizzas. Only one security camera. That was good. And a clear line of site to anyone approaching the door. I felt for the Python under my shirt. A sure ride back to the big house. Ten years easy just for looking at it.

That’s when I heard the voice. Swear to God, clear as crystal, coming from the stack of frozen pizzas. And it was talking to me.

“Square Dancing,” it said. “You got people who think the square is a pansy-dance. It’s so misunderstood.”

I almost had a heart attack right there. It was talking to me, no disputing it. “That’s right,” I said back. I had to catch my breath. “Rackin’ right. Square dancing is the legacy of kings.”

The voice whispered in return, “The Court ballet. The Great Quadrille. You gotta look at the ancestry. The whole frickin’ family tree spells legacy. Period. End of statement.”

Damned if I wasn’t hooked. “It’s legitimate,” I replied. “The Grand Sashay—that’s mainstream. It’s when you start into a Wheel and Deal, followed by Eight Chain Through and a Flutterwheel. Now that’s beyond beautiful!”

“But here’s the rub,” the voice replied. “You can’t ever know it all. There’s too much. Forget about it. The best you’re gonna do is figure out the magnitude of what you’ve been trying to learn.”

All I could do was nod. The ballast in the fluorescent light above snapped like a bug zapper.

“You know what you have to do then, don’t you?” the voice said.

And I did. It was resolution time. We’d start practicing every night. Twice on Saturdays. Sundays would be call drill, working out our moves on a white board. We’d practice the Cross Tail until we were cross-eyed. We’d Shoot the Star until we saw stars. It was gonna hurt but it was gonna be beautiful. What Kyle calls geometry with gestures. You got that right, Kyle. I grabbed a pizza and headed for the counter. “Keep it.” I said, throwing down a ten.

It was a warm night but for some reason I felt a chill run up my back as I slipped into the front seat and started the engine. Came close to throwing it all away just then, I thought. But I didn’t. There are two questions I’d learned to answer in the big house. Numero uno: You want to live or you want to die? Question two is, you gonna live with pride? If you don’t answer that one right, you go back to question number one. It’s that simple. A lot of people end up back at question number one.

The Red Barons, they did us greasy. And it’s one thing to be greased, but it’s another to be greased by a bunch of stiffnecks. Hell, to get the hill back, we had to pay the price. And like I said, an hour from now, a hundred years from now, I’m gonna be a Saintly Devil. Till I die. No maybe, baby. Saintly Devil till I die. Proud of it, too.