Perry Smith’s belief in fate and omens

Perry Smith’s belief in fate and omens is a recurring way of making sense of choices whose outcomes he cannot control. He reads missed meetings, bodily warnings, remembered premonitions, and a childhood dream as evidence that events may be set in motion before a person understands them. Yet his fatalism is not passive: he still acts, takes chances, and proceeds toward danger, even as he interprets what happens as confirmation that fate has already arranged the course.

Superstition and the return to Kansas

Perry’s superstitions are practical and specific. Among the things he considers unlucky are the number fifteen, red hair, white flowers, priests crossing a road, snakes appearing in dreams, and anything connected with nuns. The list follows him even when circumstances press him to ignore it. At a Catholic hospital outside Emporia, Dick goes inside to try to obtain black stockings from a nun, an idea Perry had proposed because he assumed nuns would have stockings available. Perry waits in the car, despite his own belief that dealing with nuns invites bad luck. The episode shows how his convictions can warn against an action without preventing it: he treats the errand as something fate has arranged, not as a choice he can simply refuse.

That sense of arrangement also lies behind his return to Kansas. Dick’s invitation offered one reason to travel, but Perry’s concealed purpose was to see Willie-Jay, a former cellmate he regarded as his real and only friend. When Perry learned that Willie-Jay was due to leave the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing on November 12, the possibility of reunion mattered more to him than Dick’s criminal proposal. Perry sold his worn-out car in Las Vegas, packed maps, letters, manuscripts, and books, and took a Greyhound bus. He later explained his presence in Kansas to himself through fate, while keeping the actual motive from Dick.

The journey produced the sort of coincidence that could sustain Perry’s belief and deepen his disappointment. He reached Kansas City on the evening of November 12, only to learn from Reverend James E. Post that Willie-Jay had left town five hours earlier, from the same terminal. The chaplain said Willie-Jay was headed east, toward work and a home with people prepared to help him, but declined to give Perry his precise destination. Perry hung up dizzy with anger and disappointment. When the first anguish passed, he reconsidered what a reunion could have meant: as free men, he and Willie-Jay might have been too different to form the kind of team Dick and Perry imagined. Still, Perry remained convinced that even an hour together would have kept him from waiting outside the hospital for Dick. Fate, in this instance, appears as a missed meeting that narrows his alternatives until Dick’s proposition is all that remains.

Omens in the immediate present

On the approach to Garden City, Perry’s attention to signs becomes attached to small physical details. At a Phillips 66 station in Finney County, he goes into the men’s room while Dick has the car filled. His legs hurt with the familiar severity associated with his old accident; he takes aspirin, rubs his stiff knees, and checks the rubber gloves he has bought. As he pulls them on, one splits between the fingers. The tear is slight, but Perry takes it as an omen. The moment is revealing because the warning is materially ambiguous: the glove has torn, while the danger Perry fears is still ahead. His interpretation turns an ordinary mishap into part of an anticipated pattern.

Later, reading a newspaper account of the unsolved killings, Perry objects to its description of an unknown killer or killers. He presses Dick about the claim that investigators have no clues, and says he does not believe the account. Perry invokes his hunches as a reason he is still alive and recalls Willie-Jay’s belief that he possessed extrasensory perception, a kind of inner radar that could register events before they became visible. His challenge to Dick is not based on a new fact about the investigation; it comes from Perry’s conviction that foreknowledge can arrive privately, before ordinary evidence catches up.

He supports that claim with remembered examples. In 1949, while he was in Alaska with his father near Circle City, he said that Jimmy Smith was dead; news of Jimmy’s death arrived a week later. Jimmy’s wife had killed herself, and Jimmy then shot himself. Perry also recalls working on a ship in Japan when an inner warning told him to jump from where he was resting. He moved, and heavy cargo crashed into the place he had just vacated. These memories give his theory a personal history, but the incidents reach Dick only as Perry’s testimony. Their force in the scene comes from the way Perry presents them as a pattern he has learned to trust.

The dream and the limits of foreknowledge

Perry’s strongest example is a recurring dream he says he has had since childhood. He moves through an African jungle toward an isolated tree with blue leaves and diamonds hanging from its branches. The tree smells foul, but it is beautiful to look at, and Perry wants the diamonds. He also knows in advance that a snake guards the tree and will fall on him if he reaches for one. He nevertheless takes a diamond; the snake attacks, crushes his legs, and begins to swallow him feet first. The dream binds desire to foreseen injury: knowledge of the danger does not cancel the wish that draws him toward it.

When Dick asks why a person who foresaw his motorcycle crash did not avoid it by staying off the bike, Perry answers that once an event is set to happen, one can only hope it will or will not, depending on what is wanted. A person cannot stop living simply because something bad may be waiting. His account of the accident, which he says he saw in his mind before it occurred, therefore does not make him the master of prediction. Instead, it defines a painful limit: foreknowledge may expose danger without providing a means to escape it. The dream’s diamonds and snake give that limit an image, while Perry’s explanation states its governing principle.

Meaning and tension

Perry’s fatalism contains a contradiction the narrative keeps active. He calls his return to Kansas an outcome arranged by fate, but the route there consists of decisions: selling his car, buying a bus ticket, pursuing a reunion, and accepting Dick as the remaining alternative. He treats the torn glove as a warning and the missed reunion as decisive, yet neither sign itself explains what must follow. Fate gives shape to uncertainty after the fact and makes coincidence feel like direction; it does not remove Perry’s participation in events.

His account is also distinct from religious faith. During his imprisonment, Willie-Jay’s religious devotion and singing unsettled Perry’s contempt for piety, and Perry made a portrait of Jesus that the chaplain valued. But Perry judged the portrait an act of hypocrisy and remained unconvinced of God. His later language of fate, omens, and extrasensory perception does not amount to a settled theology. It offers another vocabulary for patterns he believes he has encountered, especially the sense that impending disaster can be felt without being prevented.

The result is a worldview poised between warning and surrender. Perry claims that his intuitions have kept him alive, yet his remembered foreknowledge of the motorcycle accident did not keep it from happening; the snake in his dream is anticipated, but anticipation cannot disarm it. In the scenes leading toward Garden City, an omen can be no larger than a split glove, and a life-changing turn can hinge on arriving at a terminal five hours too late. Together, these episodes make fate less a promise of protection than a force Perry believes he can sometimes recognize, but never command.