The first I heard of Dante was at the county fair when I was ten, Dante's Inferno slashed in red on a black trailer at the bottom of the hill where they showed the livestock. It was surrounded by little lights like the blinking eyes of the damned and booths with stacks of old-fashioned milk bottles: two dollars for three throws and you could win a mirror painted with the rebel flag or with a half-naked lady, or with a naked lady half-wrapped in the rebel flag.

I wanted to go on the Ferris Wheel, for the way it turned above the noise and the smell of manure and funnel cakes, how it reminded me of a queen I saw in a movie once, raising her head to meet the eye of the executioner. My friends wanted the thrill of Dante's trailer, where shrieks and groans from a cone speaker mixed with bleats drifting down from sheep on the hill.

This was the summer Nick O'Hare's cousin killed himself after graduation, and a drought set in that left the earth cracked and flaked like old paint.

But there wasn't a war then.

I stood in line looking out over cars parked on dead grass, their jagged rows like gravestones, two big crows perched on the utility pole at the center.
 

Years later, there is a copy of La Commedia on my desk while I write this, and two more editions on the shelf, but I'm thinking of how we entered the Inferno two at a time in little cars on a greasy track, how a bar lowered across our laps and two black doors swung open as we watched our friends before us disappear around a dark curve.