Dick and Perry’s Old Chevrolet

Dick and Perry’s Old Chevrolet is both their means of escape and a cramped, shifting inventory of the life they are trying to carry with them. It takes Dick and Perry Smith from Kansas City toward Mexico, holds their accumulated possessions, and ultimately becomes the source of money for a plan that fails almost as soon as the car is gone.

A car packed for departure

The Chevrolet left Kansas City on Saturday night, November 21, with luggage lashed to its fenders and roped to the roof. The trunk was packed so full it could not be closed; inside, two television sets were stacked on the back seat, leaving Dick, at the wheel, and Perry Smith, clutching his Gibson guitar, little room. The arrangement makes the car more than transport: its passengers’ escape and their belongings are compressed into the same crowded space.

Perry Smith’s other possessions filled the interior: a cardboard suitcase, a gray Zenith portable radio, a gallon jug of root-beer syrup, and two large boxes of books, manuscripts, and memorabilia. He had brought the syrup because he feared his favorite drink might not be available in Mexico. Dick resented the boxes, cursing and kicking them and dismissing their contents as five hundred pounds of rubbish. The disagreement gives the packed car a second function: it makes visible the different value each man assigns to what they are carrying. Perry Smith’s cherished materials take up space Dick would rather use for something practical; neither man can simply leave the other’s priorities behind while they share the vehicle.

The route into Mexico

Around midnight, the car crossed into Oklahoma. Perry Smith felt relief at being out of Kansas and thought of the departure as final, while Dick left behind family members he had not told or said goodbye to. The car carried both men away, but their departure did not mean the same thing to each of them: Perry Smith believed he was leaving no one who would deeply wonder where he had gone, whereas Dick had people he claimed to love.

They crossed the border at Laredo on the morning of November 23. After spending their first night in Mexico at a brothel in San Luis Potosí, they continued toward Mexico City. On the second day of the Mexican journey, the car was parked at a promontory where the men had stopped to picnic. The scene places the vehicle temporarily at rest, with Dick looking through binoculars at mountains, circling hawks, and a dusty road winding through a village. Their destination remained two hundred miles away. Even while the car provided mobility, the journey was not a settled arrival: it kept the pair moving between places without giving them a secure way to live.

Cargo sold off, car sold

As money dwindled, the possessions that had made the Chevrolet so crowded became disposable. By the time Dick and Perry Smith were in Mexico, they had mostly sold the goods acquired during their Kansas City check-passing spree, including a camera, cuff links, and the television sets. They also sold binoculars and a gray Zenith portable radio to a Mexico City policeman Dick had met. The material load that had accompanied their flight was being converted into cash, but the sales did not produce lasting security.

Dick insisted that they return to Mexico City and sell the car. He imagined finding a garage job and saving money; Perry Smith anticipated that any proceeds would soon be spent on vodka and women. The car had carried their plan south, but in Mexico it became the plan’s remaining convertible asset. Dick sold it, and three days later the proceeds—slightly less than two hundred dollars—had largely vanished. On the fourth day he went out looking for honest work and returned to complain that an expert mechanic could earn only two dollars a day. Without the car, their choices narrowed rather than opened: Dick borrowed money from the richer of his two fiancées and bought bus tickets that would take them via San Diego as far as Barstow, California. He said that after that they would walk.

A vehicle made conspicuous

The Chevrolet’s usefulness as an escape vehicle also made it a concrete identifier for the search. A Las Vegas police memorandum circulated a description of Dick and Perry Smith as wanted in Kansas for parole violation and said they were probably armed and dangerous; it listed a 1949 Chevrolet bearing Kansas license JO-58269. The same car that had carried their overloaded belongings and taken them across borders could therefore be described to law enforcement by its make, year, and plate.

Its narrative course turns on that change in value. At departure, the Chevrolet is a crowded but functional means of getting away, stuffed with the possessions through which Perry Smith imagines a future elsewhere. In Mexico, it is stripped of much of that cargo and then sold to pay for the next attempt at movement. The money disappears, the vehicle is gone, and the proposed route back to the United States ends in a plan to continue on foot. The car enables flight, but it cannot turn flight into a durable new life.