Part Thirty

My pop, Pete Green Senior, was a real cowboy. Everybody here called him Big Pete – he wasn’t that big, kind of wiry actually, but they called him that to distinguish him from me. Me, they still call Little Pete, even though… well, look at me. Six-two and a few too many cheeseburgers.

But Big Pete grew up in Oklahoma in the 40s and was a cowboy early, because everybody else was busy fighting World War II. The war ended when Pop was 15. Soldiers started coming back, and ranching was already sort of a marginal proposition, and so Pop said he was hard pressed to see much of a future in Oklahoma for himself.

I think there was a girl, too. You know how that goes.

So anyhow he goes out to Hollywood because he had an uncle, Uncle Gee, they called him, who was a horse wrangler for a movie studio. And Uncle Gee gave Pop a job. You know, the late 40s, early 50s, they were still making a lot of westerns. And Pop started hanging out with some of the stuntmen, and they started having him show the actors how to look a little more like a cowboy. How to sit a horse, get the rig right, things like that. One of the stuntmen showed him how to do a quick draw and Pop had a real aptitude for it. And by 1955, 1956, Big Pete was working as a sort of cowboy trainer. Movies and then TV shows. He showed James Arness how to draw for Gunsmoke.

He met my mom. She was an actress. You never heard of her. She was in half-a-dozen pictures. She tended to play the ex-girlfriend or the pretty but dimwitted sister.

She died when I was little.

After while they weren’t making many Westerns. I was getting to be a teenager and my Pop decided he didn’t want me growing up in LA. So he took the money he’d saved and bought this place, 20,000 acres of scrub in southwest New Mexico. He was going to go back to cattle ranching. Called the place the Bar Nothing, and that’s still our brand – a bar and a zero.

But it wasn’t any more profitable then. I went to high school and he taught me how to be a cowboy and I went to college and he tried to sell the place. But nobody else was crazy enough to buy it.

Then in like 1980, 1981, something like that, a bunch of guys from Germany decided to make a Western. And they came out here and rented some land and built a little clapboard town, one with a surprising amount of historical accuracy, actually. Called it Greenville, after us. And they hired Pop to train all their actors, and actresses, too. We put them up in the bunkhouse. And that was the only year the ranch made any money – the year we hosted those Germans. So that got Pop to thinking that maybe he could sell the place to one of his old Hollywood pals, because, like he said, they all had more money than sense. So he worked a few of his old connections.

And what happened was that these old directors and writers and actors would come out, and say the same thing, in different ways: good to see you again, Pete, nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.

Still, it paid off in one way, because everybody saw the little town and all this empty space with no power lines and we got used in some other films. Couple of mini-series, a few other foreign films; whenever someone wanted to do a Western, they would think about shooting at the Bar Nothing. And hire Big Pete to train them. Once I got out of school I would pick up some money working as a wrangler and an extra.

I was teaching high school history over in Darby. That’s the nearest real town.

Anyhow, we’re losing money raising cattle and making money playing nursemaid to a bunch of pretty-boy actors who want to learn how to look like a cowboy in two weeks. And renting out Greenville, and after each film the town is a little bit bigger, a little bit more fully fleshed out. And one day it hits my old man – dude ranch. Actually, he read an article in Reader’s Digest about Williamsburg, Virginia, and that was his inspiration. He wanted to build, not just a dude ranch, but a cowboy Williamsburg. He called some of the same rich Hollywood types and they backed him, and the Bar Nothing has been very, very profitable ever since. I quit teaching and went back to school – studied hotel and restaurant management at UNLV – and when Big Pete died a couple years ago I took charge of the Greenville/Bar Nothing Historic Resort.

My pop was, in his own way, a visionary, I guess.

So, right, Preacher Haywood. I met him when my first wife and I went to Seattle on vacation. And we stopped by this restaurant being run by one of my old friends from UNLV, Sarah Douglas. Have you ever met him? Preacher? I mean, how could you not like the guy? Smart, personable, funny, hard-working. I told him, you ever want to get out of the rain, come down to New Mexico with me and I’ll have a job for you.

And damned if he didn’t show up on my doorstep a few months later.