Oscar Casares never expected to be a writer.

A writer, after all, was someone who grew up in a house full of books. Whose father smoked a pipe, wore a sweater.

"That's so far from my upbringing," says Casares, who was raised in a border town with no real literary aspirations. "I thought, I'm not cut out for this. I don't have the background."

Yet in Brownsville , his debut short-story collection, the 45-year-old Casares captured the worries and the humor of life in his hometown. That 2003 collection -- which proved he knew his way in and out of a story, that he was dead-on with a metaphor -- put him and Brownsville on the literary map.

Amigoland , Casares' first novel, is a tribute to the literary heritage he did grow up with, though he certainly wouldn't have called it that at the time.

"I had two uncles who would come over to the house and tell stories," says Casares, who teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. "What I took from them is the idea that someone is in front of you, very literally, when telling a story but also when telling a story on the page. There's always someone engaged in the text and where the story is going even if the story is about the most mundane aspects of life."

Amigoland is about two old men who argue a lot, a less-than-sexy topic -- on the surface, anyway -- and one with plenty of room for the mundane.

Don Fidencio, 91, lives in a

Brownsville nursing home. He's a big-time grouch, and understandably so. All his belongings are divided into five numbered shoeboxes. A former postman, he hasn't bothered to learn the names of the patients or staff at Amigoland, where his daughter and son-in-law sent him to live after his stroke. Instead, his roommate is the Gringo With the Ugly Finger. An employee is the One With the Flat Face. And so on.

Fidencio's only surviving sibling is Celestino, now in his early 70s. A former barber with a dramatic shock of white hair, Celestino recently lost his wife but has found amorous companionship with Socorro, a woman 30 years his junior who crosses the river from Mexico to clean houses. Celestino takes Viagra and prides himself on his vitality. He hasn't seen Fidencio in a decade, when they argued about a haircut.

Socorro puts the brothers back in touch; she wants her new lover to tell someone in his family about their relationship. But Fidencio, whose memory can be as unsteady as his legs, is more interested in talking to Celestino about their grandfather, who was supposedly captured by Indians as a young boy in Linares, Mexico. According to family lore, he watched his parents die before being swept up on a horse and taken north by the Indians, who left him on the U.S. side of the river.

Fidencio asks Celestino to take him to Linares to find out if the old family story is true, and a book that begins with an old man shuffling around a nursing home finds its legs in Mexico, where an unlikely trio -- Socorro joins the brothers -- face the past and the future.

In large part, Amigoland explores the ways family stories survive over time: reinterpreted, embellished and enhanced. Casares didn't have to reach far for the abducted-by-Indians story.

"It was one of the first stories I ever heard growing up," said Casares, who got close to solving his own family mystery. He met with a state archivist in Linares who gave him every reason to believe that the story was true. But Casares didn't take it any further. He didn't want to be burdened with the truth when he sat down to write fiction.

The very best parts of Amigoland -- the passages that shimmer on the page and stick in the reader's mind -- confront the daily indignities of growing old. Both brothers face long days with few activities to fill them. At the nursing home, Fidencio eats, sleeps and smokes when he is told. Most poignant is his awareness of the slow march to dependency: from cane to walker to wheelchair.