Actively engaged in attempted murder

By Marc Robertson - Editor | July 27, 2023

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

Marc Robertson

I was driving through Laredo recently, and reached the point at which IH-35 ends at a traffic light.
It’s rather an abrupt ending for one of America’s longest, busiest and most important trade thoroughfares.
One has adequate warning, of course. There have been plenty of signs on the approach to the border city, and the milemarkers have gradually counted down to zero.
That’s when you really know you’ve reached the end of the road. When the sign says zero, it’s pretty much the end.
The same thing happens in Corpus Christi. The interstate from San Antonio comes unraveled in a little concrete spaghetti tangle of roads that go this way and that, but if one stays on the main road long enough, one is stopped by a traffic light before one falls into the sea.
If one keeps going on the main road in Laredo, one ends up in Mexico.
There I was, sitting at the traffic light, when I caught some unusual movement at the corner of my eye, just off to the left, where a grassy embankment rose to the edge of a road that went in a different direction.
I looked, and there was nothing to see. Just some other cars that had reached the end of the road like I had. Everyone was sitting patiently.
After a second or two, I caught it again. This time I was sure I had seen something that didn’t belong on the edge of an interstate highway.
Just visible over the hood of a truck to my left, a bare arm swung through the air, its hand holding what looked like an iron bar.
Then it was gone.
My traffic light was still red.
I kept looking.
A moment later, two heads appeared, both filthy, both glistening in sweat and fresh blood.
That’s not something you see every day.
Then the bodies rose up, arms swinging, free hands clutching at torn shirts, torsos twisting, legs kicking whenever they could.
Two young men were beating the living daylights out of each other at the edge of the road.
I don’t mean they were just mildly cross with each other, the way one might be if someone changed the radio station. No, I mean these two young men were actively engaged in attempted murder.
One of them swung the iron bar. The other was holding something that looked like a wheel rim. It was substantial and clearly heavy. They took turns smacking each other in the head with these things. The blood gushed down their faces and into their shirts.
The wheel rim came down on one head and one man disappeared. Then the arm with the iron bar reappeared with the grievously injured man behind it, and the iron bar went across the other man’s face with the kind of force that one only hopes ever to see in a cartoon.
Except this wasn’t a cartoon. This wasn’t some sort of joke or even playful scuffle.
Drivers to my left and right were reaching for their phones. And no, they weren’t trying to film this horrible spectacle. They were dialing.
I reached for my phone to do the same, but my traffic light turned green and I accelerated across the intersection, away from the murder in progress.
The sound of sirens only a block away reassured me that someone was about to put a stop to the terror. Blue and red lights promptly flooded the intersection.
My enduring thought was not one of relief at intervention having come quickly but of something far darker. What could have been so terrible that these two men would be possessed with such an urge to commit murder?
It was murder, after all, that had been the intended outcome. You don’t repeatedly smash an iron bar or a wheel rim into someone’s head to scold them. You do it to kill them.
America’s highway ends in a red light at Laredo. It’s the point at which we are snatched from our blissful cruise and thrust face to face with a reality we’ve long chosen to ignore.
There are awful, awful things happening beyond our tinted windows.