Looking for Trouble

“In the old days,” Colm says, “parades meant three solid days of violence. Now it’s more like three solid hours.” The five of us are clustered in the dark near the edge of the River Foyle, wearing the fluorescent orange jackets that identify us as emergency personnel. I’m the only one who shivers, my borrowed jacket two sizes too large.
Across the water, smoke is rising from Fountain Street, the last Protestant enclave in the Cityside. At midnight, a canon boomed from the top of the 17th-century walls, walls that once withheld a Jacobite army for 105 days, and now the bonfire is burning high, in celebration of the 11th of August and the end of the siege, a victory that took place over three hundred years ago.
This is Northern Ireland’s second city, where the past is never dead and a name can mean the difference between belonging and not: The Walled City, Londonderry, Derry, Doire. After the Troubles ended, the suicide rate spiked—no one knows why, but that’s what we’re here to prevent, me and Colm and the three other men who’ve let me come along on their nightly patrol of the river. They range in age from late teens to mid-fifties, and I can tell, from their names and from the things they don’t discuss, that they are mixed in religion.
I wonder if they’re looking for trouble tonight. Most nights are quiet, says Sean, but not all. “So there’s this girl,” he says. “She’s over the railings of the Craigavon Bridge, clearly been crying. Guy in a Northern Ireland top is trying to talk her down. Then this other guy, drunk, comes up to her and says, ‘Don’t do it, honey, think of your Protestant heritage.’ ‘I’m no bloody Orange,’ she says, ‘I’m a Catholic.’ She comes down from the railings—that’s good, right—and she punches him. So I get in there and try to break up the fight, and all of a sudden your girl’s on top of me, and I’m thinking, What the hell is going on?”
I’m learning, you have to laugh at a story like this.
Tomorrow when the parade passes by, these men will retreat to their houses, locking their doors. Or, perhaps, they will follow in the streets with their friends, keeping an eye out for trouble. But tonight, there is no trouble. The river is at low tide, and the drunks keep their distance from the edge, stumbling home. Tonight, there is no one to be rescued, and that, I suspect, is the appeal; that is what brings them together on this cold August night, patrolling the length of the Foyle in their fluorescent jackets, laughing in the dark.