Most who witnessed the Devils Tower dustman were Lakota, who upon seeing him moved between two paradoxical modes: a reverent desire to bow down before the dust soul in honor, and a shoulder shrug at his inept attempts at communication. He lifted his arms above his head and spun around. He tried to move his lips. The dustman just couldn’t get his words out. And this in the time of the ghost dance! A time of desperation! Of urgent calling upon the spirits! Spectacularly, the Devils Tower dustman lived for twenty long minutes (white-man time), working the currents that just happened—for those few moments in the random, wildly unkempt history of wind—to unite around those huge hunks of rock at the base of the tower into a conveyor belt of air that swooped him back and forth along a span of about a quarter mile; during this swooping, he transmogrified from an unidentifiable face to that of General George Armstrong Custer. The Custer dustman grimaced in pain. A fine powdery dust gave luster to his long hair (and nixed the idea that this appearance foretold the battle at Little Bighorn. For that battle, Custer had his hair cropped close to the skull). The Devils Tower dustman dematerialized in a dramatic fashion. Instead of widening into a gyre of dust—as was the standard terminal mode of most dustmen—this one spun into a tight whip visible only as a small fissure in the atmosphere, a slice in the horizon, snapping off to the east.

Fulvous dust bowl dust mixed with Portland cement dust and limestone dust along with bits of street dust composed the only distinctly urbane dustman appearance (recorded), swirling up Thirty-second Street past the recently completed Empire State Building, bounding down the street aloft on the combined city currents that tore east-west across Manhattan. Some say the oblong cranium formed a keen resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although one recent arrival to the city (from the west) identified the dustman as Rexford Tugwell, head of the Resettlement Administration, others saw nothing but a big billowing cloud that quickly clenched into a goatlike figure that hopped and leaped all the way to Hell’s Kitchen before exploding.

Only a select few witnessed the atomic dustman, rising from the Marshall Islands just after the mushroom spread into the heavens, shortly after the duck-and-cover of the first shock wave, as they stared through carbonized glass straight into the eyeball of the inferno, to see him there, resting softly, a grimacing flesh-skull caught in a paroxysm of fire—a face distraught but attuned to his own suffering. Some claimed he had an Einsteinian wildness, a crop of unkempt hair that spread up into the sky before fading into the tremendous nonsense of the smoke and fire. Those who admitted to seeing a face in the cloud wrapped their admission in tones of jest, chalking the atomic dustman up as just one more of those strange nuclear-blast phenomena: nuclear heat sprites, fire curls, and of course the infamous bandy-eyed lady who is known to impress herself on the inside of eyelids of atomic witnesses, belly dancing and twisting to some tight bongo beat. (If they had looked closely they would have seen the atomic dustman working his slack jaw over what seemed to be the word geshem.)