Gun Guys (16 page)

We came upon a pair of newlyweds on a honeymoon float; they offered us leftover wedding canapés and slushy margaritas, so we lashed our canoes to their raft. Suddenly: a gunshot. A hundred yards ahead, a bullet splashed into the river. A second later came another shot and another splash. Firing at water is the act of a madman; there’s no telling where the bullet might ricochet. So much for being away from guns for a few days. We back-paddled, yelling.

“Hey! Hey!” Craig stood in his canoe and waved his arms.

The shooting stopped. The cliffs gave way to sagebrush flats, and we could see men standing beside a jeep that had big lights mounted on the roll bar. For a minute I thought they were cops or rangers, but they were only off-road motorheads who’d bounced into the canyon on a rutted trail. We stopped back-paddling. There was no alternative but to drift past
them. Two of them, young and tattooed, in sleeveless shirts, ball caps on backward, eyeballs swimming in beer, seemed the type who showed up in YouTube videos, drunkenly firing at propane tanks. The other two, in golf caps and camouflage pants, could have been their fathers. I addressed myself to the oldest, who had steel-gray hair and a big hard belly. “Please don’t shoot at the water!” I yelled. “Those bullets can bounce anywhere!”

“We weren’t shooting at the water,” he called back. “We were shooting at those cliffs up there!” He pointed across the river at a magnificent thousand-foot tower of red rock. I was shocked into silence. Laura—accustomed, from living in Montana, to the antics of armed chowderheads—turned away discreetly and guffawed into her hand. They’d shot at the rock, and the bullet had bounced back to hit the water thirty feet in front of them. Instead of absorbing the wee physics lesson,
they’d shot at the rock again
. How long would they have kept it up if we hadn’t floated by? Until one of them ended up in the emergency room, probably. It was like watching someone try to win a Darwin Award.

Calling a man a fucking idiot when he’s holding a gun a million miles from civilization is unwise, so I requested merely that they hold fire until we’d rounded the bend. They agreed, and sure enough, as they dropped out of sight behind us, we could hear the shooting start up.

“You see what I’m talking about?” Margaret said. “A gun is not like a knife or a golf club. You can project idiocy a long ways with a gun.”

I couldn’t disagree. My sporting enjoyment over here could sever your aorta way over there. Most gun guys were careful, but chuckleheads had Second Amendment rights, too. We dropped the subject. By the time we reached our Mineral Springs takeout, two days later, we’d all but forgotten the incident. We were sunburned, sweaty, and relaxed down to the cellular level.

As we pulled into Green River in Craig’s pickup, we came under cell-phone coverage, and my phone beeped. Twenty-one messages. First thought: Rosa.

Rosa was fine. Brandon Franklin was dead.

W
e’d met Brandon in February of 2007, eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, in the band room of O. Perry Walker high school, in New Orleans. It was in some ways the city’s darkest moment since the storm. Whole neighborhoods were still dark and muddy. Barely a quarter of the inhabitants had returned. Nobody was sure the city would even survive. And New Orleans had long since dropped out of the news. The initial excitement was over, and the long slog was under way. I was in town to write about the recovery for
The New Yorker
.

Fully a quarter of O. Perry Walker’s kids were living on their own, bunking together in FEMA trailers or abandoned buildings. Their parents, if they had any, had been unwilling or unable to return, and an atmosphere of emergency pervaded the school. That day, though, the band room—grimy, windowless, and stuffy—was a maelstrom of excited teenagers honking their horns into tune, searching for their caps, playing grab-ass. They were getting ready for the highest-profile performance of their young careers—a march down St. Charles Avenue in a nighttime Mardi Gras parade.

The band director, Wilbert Rawlins Jr., an enormous chocolate-brown man, pulled over a broad and stolid boy named Joshua, a baritone player with a face that never changed expression. “This man walked out of the
Lower Ninth Ward all by himself, water up to here, with nothing but his mouthpiece in his pocket.” He massaged Joshua’s chest with a big hand. “Heart, you hear me? This boy has heart.” He released Joshua, grabbed a wispy, light-skinned boy, and pulled up the boy’s sleeve to reveal a pocked scar. “Tell Mr. Baum what happened.” The boy looked uncertain. “Go ahead,” Wilbert said.

“I got shot.”

“Tell him who shot you.”

“My dad.”

“Who else did he shoot?”

“My mom and my sister.”

Wilbert let him go, and he drifted off. “You see?” Wilbert said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

Wilbert told us that he would never put a kid out of band, no matter how bad the kid’s behavior. Years before, when he was teaching at another school, he’d had a kid who was so disruptive during practice that he’d had no choice but to throw him out—and a week later the child was dead, shot down on the street after school. “During band practice!” Wilbert said with stunned, breathy wonder in his voice. “We were in the band room when he got shot! If I hadn’t put him out, he’d have been there with us!”

The band-room door opened and a handsome young man loped in, swinging his shoulders in that gangster-casual figure-eight. Into my head leapt the word: “trouble.” He swaggered through the swirl of teenagers toward the front of the room, and I worried that an attitude like his might infect the band. But it was all an act. He stopped, turned, and raised his right arm, and the room fell silent. “Yo,” he grunted, and horns snapped, in unison, to lips. He pulsed his arm in time, pulling the band through its scales. “That’s a little bit flat. Leviticus, that’s you,” he said above the racket to a tall boy with a trombone. “Sit up,” he said. “Put a little bit into it.” They shifted in their seats, sitting straighter. The next round of scales sounded loud and crisp.

“Brandon Franklin,” Wilbert told me. “I’ve had him since seventh grade. Excellent saxophone player. But more than that, he’s got something.” He was Wilbert’s drum major, which involved a lot more than wearing a big furry hat and waving a baton at the head of a parade. The drum major was essentially a band’s equivalent of a master sergeant. Far from being a troublemaker, Brandon held the band together for Wilbert.

Margaret and I invited him to lunch. “Anywhere you want to go,” we said, and he chose Popeyes Chicken. Over a pile of dusty popcorn shrimp, he told a story as woebegone as they came: the Desire Project, divorced and indifferent parents, an older sister dead already, constant moving from one dilapidated rental to another. What he really wanted in life was to be a high school band director like Wilbert. “But I got a baby on the way and stuff,” he said. “I got to work. I got to provide. I might go to welding school. That’s where the money at.”

We were clearing away the paper residue of lunch and heading for the door when Brandon, behind me, said something so softly that I missed it. I turned and said, “What?”

“I like to be listened to,” he said, looking at the floor. “That’s all I need: a little attention.”

He managed not only to graduate—we watched him do backflips across the stage to receive his diploma—but to get himself accepted into the band program at Texas College. (“Brandon Franklin is not going to be no welder,” Wilbert told us proudly.) But being that far from home, with a baby—and then another—was too hard, and he eventually dropped out. Wilbert turned Brandon’s homecoming into an opportunity, making him an assistant band director, putting him up in the guest room of the house that Wilbert and his wife, Belinda, had rebuilt after the storm, and inducting him into the wildly competitive domino games that were Wilbert’s recreation. When you beat a fellow at dominos in Wilbert’s crowd, you got to stick a Band-Aid on him as a mark of defeat, and Brandon often had the pleasure of doing so to Wilbert. “That boy has become Wil’s son,” Belinda told me more than once. “Actually, it’s more like he’s become Wil—a younger version of his own self.”

A lot of those twenty-one voice mails waiting for me in Green River were from Belinda. In the first one, she was crying so hard I could barely make out the message that Brandon was dead; she’d just seen the news on television as she dressed for work. “Wilbert is still asleep,” she sobbed. “I don’t know how to wake him. I don’t know what he’ll do.”

Brandon’s killing was one of those unspeakably stupid incidents that show up in FBI homicide statistics as “other”: The mother of his children
squabbled with her new boyfriend, and when he stormed out, she called Brandon to come over and change her locks. The boyfriend returned with a gun and, finding Brandon, shot him dead—New Orleans’s eightieth murder that year, and it was only May.

The shooter’s name was Ronald Simms; he turned himself in to police that night. He was no gangbanger, but rather seemed to be a decent, hardworking guy who for reasons unknown had spun momentarily out of control. Where had he gotten the gun? Nobody knew. Truth is, nobody seemed to be asking that question, either at the funeral or in the voluminous comments about the shooting posted online. Everybody seemed to assume that if a young man wanted a gun in New Orleans, plenty were available. He could have borrowed it from a friend. He could have bought it out of the trunk of a car in a back alley.

Or he might have paid retail for it, with a credit card, in a brightly lit suburban gun store. New Orleans had no gun shops within its city limits, but several lay in the outlying parishes. Gun laws were loose in Louisiana; stores had to follow federal laws about performing background checks and not selling handguns to people under twenty-one, but no further restrictions applied. Simms was twenty-two and had no criminal record. It’s possible that he’d stopped at a store on his way to his girlfriend’s house, waited fifteen minutes for his background check, and continued on his merry way to do the killing.

If a background check wouldn’t have prevented Brandon’s murder, might a waiting—or “cooling off”—period have done the job? From 1993 to 1998, federal law required anybody buying a handgun in a store to wait three days before picking it up. That federal rule was replaced by the requirement to perform instant background checks, but ten states retained waiting periods of their own. Had Louisiana had such a law in place, might Brandon have survived his encounter with Simms?

It’s impossible to say. In 2005, a group of nine physicians and public health academics collected every study they could find on the effect that various types of gun laws—bans, registration, background checks, and waiting periods—had on rates of violent crime. They published their results in the
American Journal of Preventive Medicine
, which often published articles on the negative public health implications of widespread gun ownership. When it came to waiting periods, the seven studies evaluated by the team found a statistically significant reduction only in suicide among people over age fifty-five, with no reduction in murder or assault.
Whether a cooling-off period would have saved Brandon’s life was yet another excruciating mystery.

The funeral was, even by New Orleans standards, a doozy. There must have been a thousand people in the stifling warehouse of the New Orleans East church. It was the fashion, at the funeral of a murdered young person, for mourners to wear T-shirts garishly printed with the deceased’s image, his date of birth (“thugged in”), and his date of death (“thugged out”). But nobody was wearing such a thing at Brandon’s funeral; he was no thug. He lay in an open white coffin, wearing his blue band uniform.

“In the past month, I’ve buried six boys this age!” the pastor shouted from the pulpit. He paused for a long moment as a roomful of Majestic Mortuary paper fans beat furiously against the rising heat and the sobbing reached a crescendo. “Nineteen years old! Twenty-one! Twenty! Nineteen! Eighteen! Twenty-two! Six of them!”

At the end of the service, a thousand people filed past the coffin, and Wilbert, burying a “younger version of his own self,” leaned over and spoke to Brandon in words I couldn’t hear, and did something to the boy’s jacket. When I reached the coffin, I saw that he’d put a Band-Aid on Brandon’s lapel.

Sweating in his stiff funeral suit and talking in a kind of trance, as though he still couldn’t believe it, Wilbert fleshed out the story for me. “When the boyfriend came back with that gun, he didn’t know Brandon was going to be there. He was coming to kill the girl and them kids. She told me Brandon spent about fifteen minutes trying to talk him out of it, saying, ‘Come on, man, you don’t want to kill nobody; put up the gun.’ But it went on and on, and she told me Brandon finally lost patience with the guy and said something like, ‘Punk-ass motherfucker, you ain’t going to kill nobody.’ And that’s when the guy flicked off, and shot Brandon like fifteen times. He was dead right there.”

On the long walk to the cemetery, several dozen people danced behind the horse-drawn hearse, parasols held high, because that’s what the tradition required. People clapped hands; sang along; bought bottles of water, beer, and Sprite from the inevitable vendors pulling coolers on wagons. The photographers were there, as they always were, endlessly reaching for the perfect shot of New Orleans culture on display.

Since Katrina, New Orleans had been undergoing a slow-burn freak-out that made shootings even more widespread and unpredictable than they had been before the storm. You didn’t have to be a gangbanger to catch a bullet; Brandon’s death made that clear. The broken levees, the ruined neighborhoods, the loved ones drowned and displaced—all that had been inflicted upon New Orleans. The violence was the city’s own doing. Guns were, as New Orleanians might have put it, a lagniappe of misery. As I trudged along behind the hearse, with Brandon’s band blaring and people dancing beneath parasols to celebrate a life cut short by a handgun, it was a little awkward to have a .38 Colt secretly digging into my sweaty back.