Other than Jonathan, my brother Joe is my best friend. We have done lots of things together. In 1986, together we traded currency on the black market in a back alley in Shanghai. That was in the days when Americans couldn't get into China very easily and I would have been scared of doing anything illegal there, but I wasn't because Joe was with me. He was with me when I got pushed into an open ditch in Jakarta during a cholera epidemic and there was a corpse already down there. He was with me during an epic blizzard in New York City so monumental that the parked cars on the streets were completely buried with only the tips of their radio antennae sticking up and we started laughing so hard that we had to sit down in the snow in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

And he was the one, back in the late 1970s who first went down to the only real record store in our benighted little Last Picture Show hometown and came back with the first LPs from The Clash and The Sex Pistols and I finally heard music that matched all the things I felt then.

So last week, it was only right that we went together back to that town where we grew up for one final visit before we never go there again. When people asked us what we were doing there (we are obviously strangers now), we told them that we were there to visit our father's grave, which was true, but not the whole story because the whole story, as is often the case, is far too difficult to explain.

The town itself has not changed much. The population is still almost what it was when we left. Maybe most things are a little shabbier. The grain elevator at the feed mill right near downtown blew up three days before we got there. I would have thought that this event would have caused more excitement among the populace than it appears to have done. I guess grain elevators exploding is just a fact of life that people there are resigned to. We had a view of the remaining part of the feed mill from our hotel room window and it seemed to be fine.

Also, itinerant muralists apparently come to town every summer now and paint a mural on the side of one lucky public building. I was surprised by the choices of subject matter and, again, would have thought that it might have caused more comment than it seems to have done. My favorite was the two-story-high mural of an irritated possum, but Joe was partial to the big weasel which we could also see from our hotel room window. It was, taken all together, a million-dollar hotel room view.

We arrived in the late afternoon, having driven all day through the flat and desolate Arkansas rice land. After checking in and enjoying the fenestral panorama, we walked down to the river where we had gone so many times during all those growing up years. It was still exactly the same -- the same weeds and clover and ancient trees, the same worn rock shelves reaching out into the same muddy water that you can't even see an inch down into.

I had my first ever taste of beer while sitting on those worn river rocks, under those same ancient trees. It was believed by the high school kids then (and possibly now) that if you were drinking underage down at the river and the cops showed up, if you could manage to swim across the river to Oklahoma on the other side, the cops were legally prohibited from following you and you would not be busted. Although this was always the working theory -- held as gospel among all the teenagers in town -- I never knew of anyone who had ever actually tried it. This is probably just as well seeing as how the far-side bank is a good ways off and anyone drunk enough to try it was almost certainly drunk enough to fail at it.

But the bigger idea -- that if you could just manage to get across that river, you would somehow be free -- that idea was a strong one and I wasn't the only kid in that town who ever looked across that muddy water with silent longing. Probably every kid who has ever grown up on the edge of a river thinks about escape. Rivers do that to you.

And when I did leave, when I was 18, it was in fact across that river, being driven over it and on into Oklahoma to the airport in Tulsa (the closest airport there was) for a plane to Boston, which might as well have been the moon. I hardly ever came back after that, even to visit.

Standing there on those same old rocks that first afternoon back, my brother and I didn't even have to say anything to each other -- we both just bent down and touched the water with our fingertips.

Later we went to the little bookstore in town that has just opened up right before my father got too sick to go to bookstores anymore. He had bought two books there, not because he particularly wanted them, but because he wanted to support such a thing as a bookstore opening there in amongst the river and the feed mill and the weasel art. I bought a book for Joe and he bought a book for me because that's what Dad would have done. "I'll buy you any book you want," was his mantra of our childhood. He knew that those books were building us a bridge out of that place.

The next day we went to visit his grave in the Catholic church and when I touched the holy water there with my fingertips, it was a strange echo of the river.